Biography of Tennesse Williams

• Williams was a master playwright of the Twentieth century

• His twenty-five full-length plays combined lyrical intensity, haunting loneliness and hypnotic violence.

• Widely considered the greatest Southern playwright

• Born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26 1911, he suffered through a difficult and troubling childhood.

• His father was an emotionally absent parent. He became increasingly abusive.

• His mother lived the adolescence and young womanhood of a spoiled Southern Belle. His mother was a loving but smothering woman.

• The young Williams was influenced by his older sister Rose’s emotional and mental imbalance during their childhood.

• He worked at the warehouse and wrote late into the night. This strain was too much and in 1935 Williams had a nervous breakdown.

• Rose’s mental health continued to deteriorate as well. During a fight between his dad and mum in 1936, his dad made a move towards Rose that he claimed was meant to calm her. Rose thought his overtures were sexual and suffered a terrible breakdown. Her parents had her lobotomized shortly afterward.

• He began going by the name Tennesse, a nickname he’d been given in college thanks to his southern drawl. After struggling with his sexuality through his youth, he finally entered a new life as a gay man, with a new name, a new home and a promising new career.

• He went to Mexico to work on a play originally titled The Poker Night.

• This play eventually became one of his masterpeices, A Streetcar Named Desire. It won Williams a second NY Critics’ Circle Award and a Poulitzer prize in 1947.

• In 1951, there was the successful adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Vivian Leigh.

• In 1951, Williams met Frank Merlo. The two fell in love, and the young man became Williams’ romantic partner until Merlo’s untimely death in 1961. He was a steadying influence on Williams, who suffered from depression and lived in fear that he, like his sister Rose would go insane.

• He was deeply interested in something called ‘poetic realism’, namely the use of everyday objects which, seen repeatedly and in the right contexts, became imbued with symbollic meaning.

• His plays also seem preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual behaviour: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths.

• Critics who attacked the ‘excess’ of Williams work often were making thinly veiled attacked on his sexuality.

• Williams had become dependent on drugs in the sixties. This grew worse after the death of Frank Merlo in 1961. Merlo’s death sent Williams into a deep depression that lasted ten years.

• Williams was also insecure about his work, which was sometimes of inconsistent quality, and he was violently jealous of younger playwrights.

• His sister Rose was in his thoughts during his later work.

• Overwork and drug use continued to take their toll on him, and on February 23, 1983, Williams chocked to death on the lid of one of his pill bottles.

• In his worst work, his writing is melodramatic and overwrought, but at his best Tennesse Williams is a haunting, lyrical and powerful voice.