Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams

Williams in 1965
Born March 26, 1911(1911-03-26)
Columbus, Mississippi, U.S.A.
Died February 25, 1983(1983-02-25) (aged 71)
New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Occupation Playwright
Information
Period 1930–1983
Genre Southern Gothic
Influences Anton Chekhov
D. H. Lawrence
August Strindberg
Hart Crane

Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) born Thomas Lanier Williams, was an American playwright who received many of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama. He moved to New Orleans in 1939 and changed his name to "Tennessee", the Southeastern U.S. state, his father's birthplace.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. In addition, The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961) received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards. His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award for best play. In 1980 he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter.

Contents

Career

With director Elia Kazan, 1967

In 1939, the young playwright received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant, and a year later, Battle of Angels was produced in Boston which failed to achieve success.

Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the WPA. He lived for a time in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana; first at 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré. The building is part of The Historic New Orleans Collection. During 1944-45, The Glass Menagerie was produced in Chicago and was widely accepted as a success. This was followed by a successful Broadway run. The play tells the story of Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda who tries to make a match between Laura and the gentleman caller. Many people believe that Tennessee used his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Tennessee: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.

He began writing A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) while living at 632 St. Peter Street in New Orleans. He finished it later in Key West, Florida, where he moved in the 1940s. He won his first Pulitzer prize for the play.

Williams followed up his first major critical success with several other Broadway hits including such plays as Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real. He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire, and reached an even larger world-wide audience in 1950 and 1951 when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into major motion pictures. Later plays which were also made into motion pictures include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955), Orpheus Descending, Night of the Iguana and Summer and Smoke.

Biography

Childhood and education

Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in the home of his maternal grandfather, the local Episcopal priest. He was of Welsh descent. His father, Cornelius Williams, a hard drinking traveling salesman, favored Tennessee's younger brother Dakin, perhaps because of Tennessee's weakness and effeminacy as a child. His mother, Edwina, was a borderline hysteric. Tennessee Williams would find inspiration in his problematic family for much of his writing.

In 1918, when Williams was seven, the family moved to the University City neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, where he first attended Soldan High School, used in his work The Glass Menagerie and later University City High School.[1] In 1927, at age 16, Williams won third prize (five dollars) for an essay published in Smart Set entitled, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" A year later, he published "The Vengeance of Nitocris" in Weird Tales.

In the early 1930s Williams attended the University of Missouri, where he joined Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. In the late 1930s, Williams transferred to Washington University in St. Louis for a year, and finally earned a degree in 1938 from the University of Iowa, where he wrote "Spring Storm." Previously, Williams had written Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay! This work was first produced in 1935 by the Garden Players community theater in Memphis, Tennessee. Regarding this production, Williams wrote, ""The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life."[2] He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City.

Personal life

Tennessee was close to his sister Rose, a slim beauty who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age. As was common then, Rose was institutionalized and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. When therapies were unsuccessful, she showed more paranoid tendencies. In an effort to treat her, Williams' parents authorized a prefrontal lobotomy, a drastic treatment that was thought to help some mental patients who suffered extreme agitation. Performed in 1937 at the Missouri State Sanitarium, the operation incapacitated Rose for the rest of her life.[3] Her surgery may have contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates often prescribed by Dr. Max (Feelgood) Jacobson.[4]

While in New York, Williams worked in many casual jobs including as a waiter at a Greenwich Village restaurant and a cinema usher. Williams worked extremely briefly in the renowned Gotham Book Mart in Manhattan, lasting less than a day.

His first sexual affair with a man was at Provincetown, Massachusetts with a dancer named Kip. He carried a photo of Kip in his wallet for many years. Having struggled with his sexuality throughout his youth, he came out as a gay man in private. When Kip left him for a woman and marriage, Williams was devastated. Williams was outed as gay by Louis Kronenberger in Time magazine in the 1950s.

While living in New Orleans, Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo, a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II. This was his only enduring relationship. Williams' relationship with Frank Merlo lasted from 1947 until 1962. With that stability, Williams created his most enduring works. Merlo provided balance to many of Williams' frequent bouts with depression[5] and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would go insane.

Due to Williams' addiction to sleeping pills and alcohol as well as his numerous episodes of infidelity, Merlo finally ended the relationship. However, soon after Merlo was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in 1963. Merlo's death deeply affected Williams and he sank into a deep depression.

He discussed his homosexuality openly on television and in print in the 70s. He released his autobiography Memoirs 1975.

His personal tragedies as well as alcoholism contributed to his emotional problems. At the insistence of his brother, he agreed to be rebaptized as a Catholic for a short time. His brother also admitted him to a psychiatric ward for treatment related to his addiction problems after a nervous breakdown in 1969.

Death

Williams died on February 25, 1983 at the age of 71.

Reports at the time indicated he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. The reports said he would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye.[6] The police report, however, suggested his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to his death. Prescription drugs, including barbiturates, were found in the room, and Williams' gag response may have been diminished by the effects of drugs and alcohol.

Williams' body was found by director John Uecker who was identified as his secretary and who travelled with Williams, and was staying in a separate room in Williams' suite.

Williams' body was taken to Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel and Williams' funeral took place on March 3, 1983 at Saint Malachy's Roman Catholic Church in New York City. At his brother Dakin's insistence, Williams' body was interred in the Calvary Cemetery, St. Louis, Missouri. Williams had long told his friends he wanted to be buried at sea at approximately the same place as Hart Crane, a poet he considered to be one of his most significant influences.

Williams left his literary rights to The University of the South in honor of his grandfather, Walter Dakin, an alumnus of the university, which is located in Sewanee, Tennessee. The funds support a creative writing program. When his sister Rose died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution, she bequeathed $7 million [7] from her part of the Williams estate to The University of the South as well.

In 1989, the University City Loop (in a suburb of St. Louis) inducted Tennessee Williams into its St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Posthumous

In late 2009, Williams was inducted into the Poet's Corner at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine [3]. The ceremony seemed geared to elevate the poet and playwright into the pantheon of great English language writers, including William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. The purpose of the ceremony seemed to be a prayer for the poet's fire to continually burn on Earth, as it would in heaven, and included elements choral music, tributes, readings, personal anecdotes from friends, and overall a tone and deliberate selections of choral music and prayer that offered acceptance and forgiveness which seemed to address certain prejudices which may have arisen against the poet in his lifetime so that the man's work could, going forward, be more fully accepted and explored.

Williams at the time of his death had been working on a final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere [4], which attempted to reconcile certain forces and facts of his own life, a theme which ran throughout his work, as Elia Kazan had said. As of September 2007, author Gore Vidal was in the process of completing the play, and Peter Bogdanovich was slated to direct its Broadway debut.[8]

Works

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Characters in his plays are often seen as representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers believed that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is also based on her.

Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie was generally seen to represent Williams' mother, Edwina. Characters such as Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer were understood to represent Williams himself. In addition, he used a lobotomy operation as a motif in Suddenly, Last Summer.

The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was awarded to A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. These two plays were later filmed, with great success, by noted directors Elia Kazan (Streetcar) with whom Williams developed a very close artistic relationship, and Richard Brooks (Cat). Both plays included references to elements of Williams' life such as homosexuality, mental instability, and alcoholism. Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at first considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board, had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thought it worthy of the drama prize. The Board went along with him after considerable discussion.[9]

Williams wrote The Parade, or Approaching the End of a Summer when he was 29 and worked on it through his life. It seemed an autobiographical depiction of an early romance in Provincetown, Massachusetts. This play was produced for the first time on October 1, 2006 in Provincetown by the Shakespeare on the Cape production company, as part of the First Annual Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival.

Other works by Williams include Camino Real and Sweet Bird of Youth.

His last play went through many drafts as he was trying to reconcile what would be the end of his life [5]. There are many versions of it, but it is referred to as In Masks Outrageous and Austere.

Plays

Apprentice plays

Major plays

Novels

Screenplays

Short stories

One-act plays

Tennessee Williams wrote over 70 one-act plays during his lifetime. The one-acts explored many of the same themes that dominated his longer works. Williams' major collections are published by New Directions in New York City.

Selected works

Related Works

A book is coming out soon by a former assistant, Scott. John Uecker has also directed Williams' plays in addition to creating an edit of In Masks Outrageous and Austere.

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Tennessee Williams and John Waters (2006) Memoirs, New Directions Publishing, 274 pages ISBN 0-8112-1669-1
  2. ↑ Tennessee State Historical Marker 2 May 2008.
  3. ↑ Philip Kolin, Something Cloudy, Something Clear: Tennessee Williams's Postmodern Memory Play. Spring 1998. Retrieved: 28 May 2010.
  4. ↑ "The Kindess of Strangers", Spoto
  5. ↑ Jeste ND, Palmer BW, Jeste DV. Tennessee Williams. Am J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2004 Jul-Aug;12(4):370-5. PMID: 15249274 [1]
  6. ↑ Suzanne Daley (27.2.1983). Williams Choked on a Bottle Cap. The New York Times (accessed 27 May 2007)
  7. ↑ New York Times obituary, September 7, 1996
  8. ↑ [2]
  9. ↑ Fischer, Heinz-Dietrich & Erika J. Fischer. The Pulitzer Prize Archive: A History and Anthology of Award-Winning Materials in Journalism, Letters, and Arts München: K.G. Saur, 2008. ISBN 3-598-30170-7 ISBN 978-3-598-30170-4 p. 246

References

External links

Pulitzer Prize for Drama

George Kelly (1926) · Paul Green (1927) · Eugene O'Neill (1928) · Elmer Rice (1929) · Marc Connelly (1930) · Susan Glaspell (1931) · George S. Kaufman / Morrie Ryskind / Ira Gershwin (1932) · Maxwell Anderson (1933) · Sidney Kingsley (1934) · Zoe Akins (1935) · Robert E. Sherwood (1936) · Moss Hart / George S. Kaufman (1937) · Thornton Wilder (1938) · Robert E. Sherwood (1939) · William Saroyan (1940) · Robert E. Sherwood (1941) · Thornton Wilder (1943) · Mary Chase (1945) · Russel Crouse / Howard Lindsay (1946) · Tennessee Williams (1948) · Arthur Miller (1949) · Richard Rodgers / Oscar Hammerstein II / Joshua Logan (1950)

(1918-1925) · (1926-1950) · (1951-1975) · (1976-2000) ·
Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Joseph Kramm (1952) · William Inge (1953) · John Patrick (1954) · Tennessee Williams (1955) · Albert Hackett / Frances Goodrich (1956) · Eugene O'Neill (1957) · Ketti Frings (1958) · Archibald MacLeish (1959) · Jerome Weidman / George Abbott / Jerry Bock / Sheldon Harnick (1960) · Tad Mosel (1961) · Frank Loesser / Abe Burrows (1962) · Frank D. Gilroy (1965) · Edward Albee (1967) · Howard Sackler (1969) · Charles Gordone (1970) · Paul Zindel (1971) · Jason Miller (1973) · Edward Albee (1975)

(1918-1925) · (1926-1950) · (1951-1975) · (1976-2000) ·
Works by Tennessee Williams
Apprentice
plays

Candles to the Sun (1936) · Spring Storm (1937) · Fugitive Kind (1937) · Not About Nightingales (1938) · Battle of Angels (1940) · You Touched Me (1945) · Stairs to the Roof (1947)
Major plays

The Glass Menagerie (1944) · A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) · Summer and Smoke (1948) · The Rose Tattoo (1951) · Camino Real (1953) · Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) · Orpheus Descending (1957) · Suddenly, Last Summer (1958) · Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) · Period of Adjustment (1960) · The Night of the Iguana (1961) · The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963) · The Seven Descents of Myrtle (1968) · In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969) · Will Mr. Merriweather Return from Memphis? (1969) · Out Cry (1971) · Small Craft Warnings (1972) · The Two-Character Play (1973) · The Red Devil Battery Sign (1975) · This Is (An Entertainment) (1976) · Vieux Carré (1977) · A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (1979) · Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980) · The Notebook of Trigorin (1981) · Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981) · A House Not Meant to Stand (1982)
Short stories

The Vengeance of Nitocris (1928) · The Field of Blue Children (1939) · The Resemblance Between a Violin Case and a Coffin (1951) · Hard Candy: A Book of Stories (1954) · Three Players of a Summer Game and Other Stories (1960) · The Knightly Quest: a Novella and Four Short Stories (1966) · One Arm and Other Stories (1967) · Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed: a Book of Stories (1974) · Tent Worms (1980) · It Happened the Day the Sun Rose, and Other Stories (1981)
Related articles
List of one-act plays by Tennessee Williams
Screenplays

The Glass Menagerie (1950) · Baby Doll (1956) · The Fugitive Kind (co-writer, 1959) · Suddenly, Last Summer (co-writer, 1959) · The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (1957, filmed 2009)
Unfinished
manuscripts
In Masks Outrageous and Austere (1983)
1979 Kennedy Center Honorees