On March 26, 1911, Tennessee Williams, née Thomas Williams, was born in Columbus, Mississippi. Williams would go on to become one of the most celebrated American playwrights in history, penning such southern gothic classics as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. During his lifetime, Williams’s work was met with intense criticism from those who thought the subjects of his play were inappropriate for public consumption. The legacy of Tennessee Williams, however, is built upon his ability to poetically portray the range of human emotions and the tragic events that cause them.
Tennessee Williams remembered his childhood in Mississippi as idyllic. He spent those years being doted on by his grandparents and enjoying the space and freedom of living in a rural town. At age seven, his father, a traveling salesman, moved the family to St. Louis. This upheaval was difficult on Williams, and in reading his anthology, we see Williams look to the South as the inspiration and setting for many of his stories. His distaste for his life in St. Louis was the catalyst for his art. He began writing because, as he said, he “found life unsatisfactory.” He spent the next decades of his life moving around the country and writing. He moved several times for his father’s job, including to New Orleans, which provided him with the setting for two of his most famous plays. He attended three different universities, finally earning his degree in dramatic writing from the University of Iowa in 1938.
Williams’s first play that made it big was The Glass Menagerie, which made its way to Broadway. This was followed shortly by A Streetcar Named Desire, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana, most of which featured on stage and on television. All of Williams’s plays addressed topics that would have been considered taboo for the time, including cannibalism, violence, lobotomy, and homosexuality. While Williams claimed his works were not autobiographical, readers can’t help but see the distant father, the overbearing mother, and the fragile sister depicted in many of his works as commentary on his personal relationships. Williams also wrote often about themes such as desire and sexuality, the difficulty of being an outcast, and the facades put on to cover the darkness of humanity. His works have become classics of the American Gothic for his poetic treatment of these themes.
Learn more here:
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Tennessee-Williams
- https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/tennessee-williams
- https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/tennessee-williams-about-tennessee-williams/737/
- https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/31/specials/williams-interview75.html?scp=14&sq=tennessee%2520williams&st=Search
