Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams)

Williams, Tennessee (Thomas Lanier Williams) (1911–83), born in Mississippi and reared there and in St. Louis, began his career as a dramatist with American Blues (1939, published 1948), one‐act plays, and Battle of Angels (1940, published 1945), revised as Orpheus Descending (1957). He first achieved success with The Glass Menagerie (1944), a play of sentiment and pathos about a frustrated mother, who is a victim of fantasies, and her withdrawn daughter. It not only is his most tender story but also is rather autobiographical.

After publishing a collection of 11 one‐act plays, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1946), he adapted, with Donald Windham, a D.H. Lawrence story as You Touched Me! (1947), and then wrote his next important play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), set in a New Orleans slum and bringing into violent contrast a neurotic woman's dreamworld and the animalistic realism of her brother‐in‐law. Summer and Smoke (1948), another study of sexual maladjustment, revised as The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964), was followed by a comedy of sex, The Rose Tattoo (1950), set in a Gulf Coast town and treating a perfervid Sicilian woman's eager quest for love. In I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix (1951) he further revealed the influence of D.H. Lawrence, about whose death the play revolves. This was followed by his fantasy play Camino Real (1953) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize), depicting bitter, abnormal family tensions in a struggle for control of a plantation.

These plays reveal the darkest side of life in Gothic situations and settings, but Williams's characters live by experiencing a full emotional involvement in life rather than shrinking from or denying it, despite the terrible violence they encounter. In his depiction of horror he went on to create other treatments of evil in Suddenly Last Summer (1958), produced with Something Unspoken (1958) as Garden District, and telling of the egocentric, sadistic, homosexual son of a doting mother who is killed and eaten by cannibal natives on a savage island; Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), about an aging movie star whose kept young man is castrated by the father of the girl he deserted; Triple Play (1959); Period of Adjustment (1960), a “serious comedy”; and The Night of the Iguana (1962), adapted from an earlier short story, presenting diverse characters in a mean Mexican hotel who, like its chained iguana, are balked and imprisoned.

Later plays include Slapstick Tragedy (1965), composed of two short works, The Mutilated and The Gnaidige Fräulein; Kingdom of Earth (1968), acted in abbreviated form as The Seven Descents of Myrtle, presenting relations among a dying transvestite, his sluttish bride, and his brother; In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), a bitter characterization of a painter; Small Craft Warnings (1972), portraying a group of “castoffs” gathered at a California coastside bar; and Outcry (1973), a slightly altered version of The Two‐Character Play (1969), presenting two actors, a brother and sister, deserted by their company and trying to sort out the relations between life and art.

Nondramatic works include The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950), a novelette about an aging actress and her sordid last affair with a gigolo; One Arm (1948, revised 1954), Hard Candy (1954), and Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974), stories; The Knightly Quest (1966), a Gothic science fiction novella and four stories; Moise and the World of Reason (1975), a novel about a homosexual writer recalling his childhood and his search for love; In the Winter of Cities (1956) and Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977), collections of poems; and Memoirs (1975), reminiscences and discussion of the creation of his plays. Williams's letters to Donald Windham were published by the recipient in 1977. Baby Doll (1956) is a film script Williams created from two of his one‐act plays.