Tennessee Williams

Diphtheria nearly killed him as a small child and kept him in the house for a year of recovery, and his father, a travelling shoe salesman with a temper and a drinking problem, decided the boy was soft and said so. They lived in his grandfather's Episcopal rectory in Mississippi until the shoe company moved them to St. Louis when he was eight. Weird Tales bought a short story from him at 17. He lasted two years at the University of Missouri, failed a military training course, and his father pulled him out and put him on the floor of the International Shoe Company. He wrote a story a week at night for three years and had a nervous breakdown before he turned 24.

The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago on December 26, 1944, found an audience because two Chicago critics kept insisting it should, moved to Broadway, and made him. A Streetcar Named Desire followed on December 3, 1947. Between 1948 and 1959 he put seven more plays on Broadway: Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Orpheus Descending, Garden District and Sweet Bird of Youth. The Night of the Iguana came in 1961. By 1959 he had two Pulitzers, three New York Drama Critics' Circle awards and a Tony. Hollywood filmed nearly all of it. Elia Kazan, who directed most of the big ones, said everything in Williams's life was in his plays and everything in the plays was in his life.

His sister Rose was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman and given a lobotomy in 1943. She was institutionalized for the rest of her life. As soon as he could afford it he moved her to a private hospital north of New York City, visited often, and assigned her a percentage of several plays so the royalties paid for her care. He was afraid of ending up where she was. When Frank Merlo, his partner of 14 years, died of lung cancer on September 20, 1963, Williams went into a depression that produced repeated commitments and years of amphetamine injections from Max Jacobson, chased with Seconal for the insomnia. He kept writing every day. Kingdom of Earth, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, Small Craft Warnings, Vieux Carré, Clothes for a Summer Hotel: all of them lost money.

He was found dead at the Hotel Elysée on February 25, 1983. The medical examiner announced that he had choked on the plastic cap of a nasal spray bottle, and that is the version people still repeat. On August 14 it was corrected: he had used the cap to take barbiturates and died of secobarbital toxicity. His 1972 will asked to be sewn into a canvas sack and dropped into the Caribbean, near where the poet Hart Crane went over the side of a ship. His brother Dakin buried him at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis instead. Most of the estate went to the University of the South, which got about seven million dollars after Rose died in 1996.

Tennessee Williams's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Glass Menagerie other
  Grew out of his short story Portrait of a Girl in Glass 1944
• A Streetcar Named Desire other
  Directed by Elia Kazan. Pulitzer Prize, 1948. 1947
• The Rose Tattoo other
  Written for and about the years with Frank Merlo 1951
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof other
  His second Pulitzer Prize 1955
• The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone book
  His first novel, drawn from a spring and summer in Rome 1950
• The Night of the Iguana other
  The last of his plays to succeed on Broadway 1961

• August 1928 aged 17 Weird Tales publishes The Vengeance of Nitocris He was 17, and signed it Thomas Lanier Williams.
• 1935 aged ~24 Breaks down and leaves the International Shoe Company A co-worker from the factory later turned up as Stanley Kowalski.
• August 1938 aged 27 Graduates from the University of Iowa with a degree in English It took him three universities and nine years.
• 1943 aged ~32 His sister Rose is given a lobotomy She was institutionalized for the remaining 53 years of her life.
• December 26, 1944 aged 33 The Glass Menagerie premieres at the Civic Theatre in Chicago
• December 3, 1947 aged 36 A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway
• 1955 aged ~44 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof wins his second Pulitzer Prize
• September 20, 1963 aged 52 Frank Merlo dies of lung cancer Williams had returned to him and nursed him to the end. The depression that followed lasted years.
• February 25, 1983 aged 71 Found dead in his suite at the Hotel Elysée The cause was corrected six months later from choking to secobarbital toxicity.

• Marlon Brando 1924–2004
  Actor whose method acting revolutionized film performance and influenced generations of actors. made famous by Streetcar
• William Faulkner 1897–1962
  Nobel laureate whose stream-of-consciousness novels set in Yoknapatawpha County reshaped American fiction. named among his influences
• Emily Dickinson 1830–1886
  Reclusive poet whose innovative use of form and slant rhyme made her one of America's greatest literary voices. among the writers he named as models
• Katharine Hepburn 1907–2003
  Four-time Oscar-winning actress whose independent spirit and wit made her a screen legend. starred in Suddenly, Last Summer
• Arthur Miller 1915–2005
  Playwright whose Death of a Salesman and The Crucible are cornerstones of American drama. one of the three American playwrights he is counted with
• Eugene O'Neill 1888–1953
  Playwright whose psychologically complex dramas established serious American theater on the world stage. the other of the three