Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. He adopted the pen-name "Tennessee" in 1939. At the time of Williams' birth, his father, Cornelius, a former telephone company employee, was working as a traveling salesman of men's clothing and shoes. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was an amateur actress and the daughter of an Episcopalian minister. Thomas—known as Tom—was their second child. Their first was a daughter, Rose, who was born in 1909. Their third child, Walter Dakin, would arrive in 1919.
Williams' father had the conventional vices of the traveling salesman, including a tendency to drink and womanize, and an aversion to domestic life. Consequently, he had not established a home of his own at the time of Tom's birth. Instead, Williams' mother lived with her parents in the Episcopal rectory, raising her first two children there, and receiving periodic visits from her wandering husband. Thus, Williams' earliest experiences were of the respectability and order of a small-town, middle-class, Southern household, minus the conventional presence of a father. His closest companion and virtually his only friend during these years was his sister Rose. Theirs was an intimate relationship that would last throughout their lives.
In 1918, Williams's life underwent a drastic change when his father accepted a managerial job with a shoe company in St. Louis, then the fourth largest city in the United States. No longer a traveling salesman, Cornelius decided the time had come to establish a home of his own, and he moved his wife and two children to the big city.
This transition from the small-town South to the urban Midwest marked a major disruption in the future playwright's childhood. Life in St. Louis was profoundly unhappy for the Williams family. Edwina struggled without success to recapture the lost refinement of her life in the South, moving the family in a continual search for more genteel housing. By the time Tom was fifteen, they had lived at a dozen different addresses in St. Louis. Meanwhile, Cornelius's continued drinking and sexual infidelity caused quarreling and even violence at home. During one altercation, Cornelius battered his way through a locked door which swung open violently, breaking his wife's nose. Life for the children was also painful. Tom was being taunted at school for speaking in a southern accent and acting like a sissy, while sister Rose was growing withdrawn from the world, suffering nausea, headaches, stomach pains, panic attacks, and in general approaching the psychotic breakdown that would eventually disable her completely.
In 1929, Williams entered the University of Missouri, only to leave after his junior year because of poor grades and family financial problems. Between 1932 and 1935, he returned to his troubled family in St. Louis. During this time, he began seriously to devote himself to writing. He also attended a business college to learn stenographic skills, and worked as a clerk in the warehouse of his father's shoe company. This period ended in April, 1935, when Williams suffered a nervous collapse. He left St. Louis to recuperate from his breakdown with his grandparents, now living in Memphis.
Returning to St. Louis in the fall of 1935, he entered Washington University, where he remained until 1937, when he transferred to the University of Iowa. At both schools he worked constantly on his writing.
His sister's mental condition continued to deteriorate as she experienced hallucinations and violent schizophrenic seizures. Finally, in the fall of 1937, her doctors diagnosed her condition as incurable, and declared her capable of doing serious harm to herself and others. The treatment they recommended was a pre- frontal lobotomy, a surgical procedure in which one part of the brain is severed from the rest, bringing about calm and controlled behavior. With her mother's permission, the surgery was performed. From that point on, Rose Williams was mentally frozen in time in the autumn of 1937. For more than forty years, she would always reply when asked about her age that she was twenty-eight, and her brother twenty-six.
Williams was emotionally devastated when he learned about the operation, carried out without his knowledge or approval. The destruction of Rose's personality was in some ways tantamount to her death, and thus for Williams amounted to the loss of the most intimate companion he had ever known. For the rest of his life, his work would be haunted by characters resembling his sister: emotionally unstable southern women terrified of the world, many of them associated with the image of roses.
Williams left Iowa in 1938, and for the next six years worked at a variety of odd jobs. He continued to publish poetry, short fiction, and drama, won a number of grants and fellowships, and for a time worked as a writer for the MGM studio in Hollywood. It was there, in 1943, that he wrote a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller, about an ageing southern belle and her troubled son and daughter. He offered the script to the studio, which promptly rejected it. Williams' revision of that screenplay became The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago in December, 1944, and in New York the following March. With this work, Tennessee Williams established himself as a major new American playwright.
His best-known later plays include A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1960). Among his numerous prizes and awards are the Tony and Critics Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the Medal of Freedom. He died in 1983—a month before his seventy second birthday.
Williams' father had the conventional vices of the traveling salesman, including a tendency to drink and womanize, and an aversion to domestic life. Consequently, he had not established a home of his own at the time of Tom's birth. Instead, Williams' mother lived with her parents in the Episcopal rectory, raising her first two children there, and receiving periodic visits from her wandering husband. Thus, Williams' earliest experiences were of the respectability and order of a small-town, middle-class, Southern household, minus the conventional presence of a father. His closest companion and virtually his only friend during these years was his sister Rose. Theirs was an intimate relationship that would last throughout their lives.
In 1918, Williams's life underwent a drastic change when his father accepted a managerial job with a shoe company in St. Louis, then the fourth largest city in the United States. No longer a traveling salesman, Cornelius decided the time had come to establish a home of his own, and he moved his wife and two children to the big city.
This transition from the small-town South to the urban Midwest marked a major disruption in the future playwright's childhood. Life in St. Louis was profoundly unhappy for the Williams family. Edwina struggled without success to recapture the lost refinement of her life in the South, moving the family in a continual search for more genteel housing. By the time Tom was fifteen, they had lived at a dozen different addresses in St. Louis. Meanwhile, Cornelius's continued drinking and sexual infidelity caused quarreling and even violence at home. During one altercation, Cornelius battered his way through a locked door which swung open violently, breaking his wife's nose. Life for the children was also painful. Tom was being taunted at school for speaking in a southern accent and acting like a sissy, while sister Rose was growing withdrawn from the world, suffering nausea, headaches, stomach pains, panic attacks, and in general approaching the psychotic breakdown that would eventually disable her completely.
In 1929, Williams entered the University of Missouri, only to leave after his junior year because of poor grades and family financial problems. Between 1932 and 1935, he returned to his troubled family in St. Louis. During this time, he began seriously to devote himself to writing. He also attended a business college to learn stenographic skills, and worked as a clerk in the warehouse of his father's shoe company. This period ended in April, 1935, when Williams suffered a nervous collapse. He left St. Louis to recuperate from his breakdown with his grandparents, now living in Memphis.
Returning to St. Louis in the fall of 1935, he entered Washington University, where he remained until 1937, when he transferred to the University of Iowa. At both schools he worked constantly on his writing.
His sister's mental condition continued to deteriorate as she experienced hallucinations and violent schizophrenic seizures. Finally, in the fall of 1937, her doctors diagnosed her condition as incurable, and declared her capable of doing serious harm to herself and others. The treatment they recommended was a pre- frontal lobotomy, a surgical procedure in which one part of the brain is severed from the rest, bringing about calm and controlled behavior. With her mother's permission, the surgery was performed. From that point on, Rose Williams was mentally frozen in time in the autumn of 1937. For more than forty years, she would always reply when asked about her age that she was twenty-eight, and her brother twenty-six.
Williams was emotionally devastated when he learned about the operation, carried out without his knowledge or approval. The destruction of Rose's personality was in some ways tantamount to her death, and thus for Williams amounted to the loss of the most intimate companion he had ever known. For the rest of his life, his work would be haunted by characters resembling his sister: emotionally unstable southern women terrified of the world, many of them associated with the image of roses.
Williams left Iowa in 1938, and for the next six years worked at a variety of odd jobs. He continued to publish poetry, short fiction, and drama, won a number of grants and fellowships, and for a time worked as a writer for the MGM studio in Hollywood. It was there, in 1943, that he wrote a screenplay called The Gentleman Caller, about an ageing southern belle and her troubled son and daughter. He offered the script to the studio, which promptly rejected it. Williams' revision of that screenplay became The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago in December, 1944, and in New York the following March. With this work, Tennessee Williams established himself as a major new American playwright.
His best-known later plays include A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Summer and Smoke (1948), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1960). Among his numerous prizes and awards are the Tony and Critics Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes, and the Medal of Freedom. He died in 1983—a month before his seventy second birthday.