Tennessee Williams was passionate, brilliant & prolific, breathing life into characters like Blanche DuBois & Stanley Kowalski in the American classic- A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE,. & like his best characters, he was troubled & self-destructive, an abuser of alcohol & drugs. He won 4 Drama Critic Circle Awards, a Tony, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, & the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He was derided by the critics & blacklisted by the Roman Catholic Church, condemning his work as “revolting, deplorable, morally repellent, & offensive to Christian standards of decency”.
Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911, the son of a shoe company executive & a Southern belle. Williams described his childhood in Mississippi as happy & carefree. His sense of belonging & comfort were lost when his family moved to the urban environment of St. Louis, Missouri. It was there he began to look inward, & he began to write “because I found life unsatisfactory.” Williams attended 3 different universities, & briefly worked at his father’s shoe company. He moved to New Orleans, which began his lifelong love of the city.
His first critical acclaim came in 1944 when THE GLASS MENAGERIE opened in Chicago & moved to Broadway. It won a Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The film version won the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award. At the height of his career in the late 1940s & 1950s, Williams worked with the great artists of the time, including Elia Kazan, the director for stage & screen productions of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, & the stage productions of CAMINO REAL, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, & SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH. Kazan also directed Williams’ shocking screenplay BABY DOLL.
In 1961, his longtime lover-Frank Merlo died of cancer. Merlo's death left Williams with a deep depression that lasted more than decade. He bacame quite insecure about his work, which was sometimes of inconsistent quality .Williams began to depend on alcohol & drugs & though he continued to write, completing a book of short stories & another play, he had begun a downward spiral.
In the 1970s, Williams wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories & a novel. In 1975 he published MEMOIRS, which detailed his life & discussed his addiction to drugs & alcohol, & his homosexuality. In the winter of 1983 Tennessee Williams died in a New York City hotel room filled with bottles of booze & pills. It was in this sort of desperation that Williams would so honestly write about & show his genius.
I find his 25 full length plays to often be melodramatic & overwrought, & yet hauntingly lonely, lyrical, powerful, & hypnotic. I started reading him in my early 20s & he continues to fascinate.
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