TENNESSEE WILLIAMS BIOGRAPHY


Tennessee Williams at age 5 Houghton Library, Harvard University


Williams eventually graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He began submitting plays as “Tennessee Williams,” using the name of his father’s home state.


For the next five years, Williams moved around several places, including the French Quarter in New Orleans, New York (where he studied playwriting at the New School), as well as St. Louis, Macon, Mexico, and more. He worked menial jobs while writing, battling against anxiety, depression, and hypochondria. Williams grew up in an atmosphere of sexual repression. He had several girlfriends as a young man, though he knew he was attracted to men. He did not begin to grapple with himself as a sexual being until he was in his mid-twenties. Williams felt a strong desire—for sex, for creation, for drink—and his plays reflect the tension between this raw desire and the taboo of acting on it. His first major play, Battle of Angels, failed.


Williams’s dear sister, Rose, was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1943, a prefrontal lobotomy—a type of experimental brain surgery severing connections in the brain—was performed on Rose, changing her personality and rendering her incapable of taking care of herself. Williams was told only after the fact. He wrote, “Rose. Her head cut open. A knife thrust in her brain. Me. Here. Smoking.” Williams lived in fear of developing a similar mental illness.


Thomas “Tennessee” Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, child of Edwina Dakin Williams and Cornelius Coffin “C.C.” Williams. His sister, Rose, was 14 months older; his brother, Dakin, was seven years younger.


Williams spent the first years of his life in his maternal grandparents’ rectories in small towns across Mississippi, absorbing the grace and elegance of the old South, as well as the religious worldview that life was a constant battle of good vs. evil.


In 1918, the family moved to St. Louis. Williams’s heart rebelled against the urban landscape, and his parents fought constantly, making home a volatile and unsafe place. Williams’s mother bought him a used typewriter, and he began his writing career with a story titled “Isolated” in his junior high newspaper. He studied journalism at the University of Missouri until he failed ROTC. C.C., who disparaged his son’s dreams of becoming a writer, forced him to leave college and work for the International Shoe Company.


The next year, The Glass Menagerie, inspired by his mother and sister, established Williams as a playwright. His success compounded with a string of his best-known plays: A Streetcar Named Desire; The Rose Tattoo; Camino Real; and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Several of these became movies.


Williams’s personal life and career suffered in the early 1960s. He broke up with his longtime partner, Frank Merlo (for more information on this relationship, turn to page 4), and split with Director Elia Kazan and some of his longtime producers. He fell increasingly into drinking and prescription drug abuse, though he continued writing, producing (among others) The Night of the Iguana and The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore. “I had... become dependent on hypnotic drugs to reach my unconscious in order to work at all,” he wrote in reflection. In 1969, Dakin had Williams committed to a hospital psychiatric ward, where he was diagnosed with acute drug poisoning. Williams never forgave his brother, whose actions saved his life.


After his hospitalization, Williams remained sober enough to continue writing through the 1970s. He spoke out against the Vietnam War and admitted his homosexuality on national television. Williams died of an overdose in 1983. He left his fortune and future royalties to Rose and to the University of South, his beloved grandfather’s alma mater.•


16 ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY


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