Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams,
was an American playwright who received many of the top theatrical awards for
his works of drama. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to
"Tennessee", the state of his father's birth.
Williams
was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in the home of his maternal grandfather, the
local Episcopal priest. He was of Welsh descent.
His father, Cornelius Williams, a hard drinking traveling salesman, favored
Tennessee's younger brother Dakin, perhaps because of Tennessee's weakness and
effeminacy as a child. His mother, Edwina, was a borderline hysteric. Tennessee
Williams would find inspiration in his problematic family for much of his
writing.
In
the early 1930s Williams attended the University
of Missouri, where
he joined Alpha
Tau Omega
fraternity. In the late 1930s, Williams transferred to Washington
University in St.
Louis, Missouri for
a year, and finally earned a degree in 1938 from the University
of Iowa, where he
wrote "Spring Storm." By then, Williams had written Cairo,
Shanghai, Bombay!. This work was first produced in 1935 by a community
theater in Memphis, Tennessee. He later studied at The New School in New York City.
Writer
Williams
lived for a time in the French Quarter of New
Orleans, Louisiana.
He moved there in 1939 to write for the WPA. He
first lived at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux
Carré. The building
is part of The Historic New Orleans Collection. He began writing A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) while living at 632 St. Peter Street.
He finished it later in Key West, Florida, where he moved in the 1940s. While
in New Orleans, Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo, a second
generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.
Tennessee
was close to his sister Rose, a slim beauty who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age. As was common then,
Rose was institutionalized and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals.
When therapies were unsuccessful, she showed more paranoid tendencies. In an
effort to treat her, Rose's parents authorized a prefrontal lobotomy, a drastic treatment that was thought to help
some mental patients who suffered extreme agitation. Performed in 1937 in Knoxville,
Tennessee, the
operation incapacitated Rose for the rest of her life. Her surgery may have
contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various
combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates often prescribed by Dr. Max (Feelgood) Jacobson.
Williams
worked extremely briefly in the renowned Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, lasting less than a
day.
Williams'
relationship with Frank Merlo lasted from 1947 until Merlo's death from cancer
in 1963. With that stability, Williams created his most enduring works. Merlo
provided balance to many of Williams' frequent bouts with depressionand the fear that, like his sister
Rose, he would go insane.
