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Born, Thomas Lanier Williams, in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1911, Tennessee Williams was the first of two children born into a prestigious Tennessee family.  The family lived for seven years in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before moving to St. Louis in 1918. He went to college at the University of Missouri, but he did not stay long.  He returned to St. Louis and worked for a shoe company, and struggled to find a way to make a living writing.  His literary career did not show promise until six years later when he produced his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, in Memphis.

Building upon the experience he gained with his first production, Williams had two of his plays, Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind, produced by Mummers of St. Louis in 1937. He briefly attended Washington University before transferring to the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938.

In 1939, just one year after graduating, he produced Battle of Angels in Boston. In 1945,   The Glass Menagerie found its way onto Broadway with both commercial and critical appeal. Containing autobiographical elements from both his days in St. Louis as well as from his family’s past in Mississippi, the play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award as the best play of the season.

The next eight years produced Street Car Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tatoo, and Camino Real on Broadway. He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for Streetcar. In 1950, his work reached an international audience when Streetcar Named Desire was made into a movie. The following year, The Glass Menagerie found a home on the silver screen.  Williams had now achieved a fame few playwrights of his day could equal.

His financial success allowed him to divide his time between a home in New York, New Orleans, and Key West.  And for the next thirty years, from the early fifties to the early eighties, his reputation grew and more of his works were produced on Broadway and made into films.  His play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was a tremendous success and earned him his second Pulitzer Prize in 1955, Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana. There is little doubt that as a playwright, fiction writer, and poet, Williams helped change the contemporary idea of the Southern literature. He helped the South find a fresh, strong voice by which to convey their experiences.   As a Southerner he not only led the way for other southern writers, but also helped the South discover the strong, true voice buried beneath its history and hushed culture.

Tennessee Williams died on February 24, 1983, at the Hotel Elysée in New York City.

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