Tennessee Williams Research Paper

Tennessee Williams was born as Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. His friends began calling him Tennessee in college, in honor of his Southern accent and his father’s home state. Williams’s father, C.C. Williams, was a traveling salesman and a heavy drinker. Williams’s mother, Edwina, was a Mississippi clergyman’s daughter prone to hysterical attacks. Until Williams was seven, he, his parents, his older sister, Rose, and his younger brother, Dakin, lived with Edwina’s parents in Mississippi. In year 1918, his Family moved to St. Louis, marking the start of his family’s deterioration. Tennessee’s father drinks heavily, they almost moved sixteen times in ten years, and he was being ostracized and taunted at

At sixteen, he won a prize in a national competition for essays answering the question “Can a good wife be a good sport?” his answer was published in Smart set magazine. With that, he was able to publish again a horror story in Weird Tales. This is the start of his career, entering University of Missouri to study journalism. After publishing so many great works, Tennessee Williams became known as major American playwright of the twentieth century who had received numerous top theoretical awards in his work. He won the Pulitzer Prize for “A Streetcar Named Desire” in 1948 and for “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1955. These two plays were later filmed, with great success, by noted directors such as Elia Kazan with whom Tennessee Williams developed a very close artistic relationship and Richard Brooks. Both plays included references to elements of William’s life like Homosexuality, mental instability, and lastly, alcoholism. Characters in his plays are often related and seen as representations of his family members. Williams died in 1983 when he choked on a medicine bottle cap in an alcohol related incident at the Elysee Hotel in New York City. He was one month short of his seventy two