Tennessee Williams

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Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), better known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright.

He and contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller are among the three leading playwrights of twentieth-century American drama. Born in 1933 in New York City, he became well-known for the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944).

This play mirrored his own traumatic family history.

It was the first of a line of triumphs, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1959), and The Night of the Irmo (1961).

He experimented with a new style that did not appeal to audiences in his later work.

On short lists of the best American plays of the twentieth century, Eugene O'Neill's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman are among Williams' most celebrated plays.

He has also written short stories, poetry, essays, and a collection of memoirs.

Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1979, four years before his death.

Education

Williams went to the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes from 1929 to 1931. He was bored with his classes and distracted by an unrequited love for a girl. He began to write articles, essays, stories, and participates in writing competitions in the hopes of earning more money. Beauty Is the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932). He became the first freshman to be commended in a writing competition as a result of his performance of beauty, a play about religious upbringing.

Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity at the University of Missouri, but he didn't fit in well with his fraternity brothers. Since he failed a military education course in his junior year, his dad pulled him out of school and sent him to work at the International Shoe Company factory. Although Williams disliked the monotony of his upbringing, his work drove him out of his gentleness. Williams wrote prolifically due to his dislike of his new 9-to-five schedule. He set a target of writing one story a week. Williams used to work weekends and late into the night.

His mother recalled his intensity:

Williams' 24th birthday was a nervous breakdown and left his career, overworked, sad, and lacking more success with his writing. Stanley Kowalski created the character in A Streetcar Named Desire from memories of this period and a particular factory coworker. His mother was divorced from his father by the mid-1930s due to his growing alcoholism and abusive temper. They never divorced.

Williams studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where he wrote the play Me, Vashya (1937). After failing to win the school's poetry competition, he decided to drop out. He went to the University of Iowa in the fall of 1937, where he earned a B.A. In August 1938, England was a republic in the United Kingdom. He later studied at The New School's Dramatic Workshop in New York City. Williams wrote about his childhood as a playwright and a young collaborative performance in Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay. "The laughter... enchanted me." For better and worse, the actors and I discovered each other. I know it's the only thing that saved my life." He began using the term "Tennesse Williams" as his professional name around 1939.

Williams' letters honor some of the poets and writers he admired in his early years: Hart Crane, Arthur Rimbaud, Anton Chekhov (from the age of ten), D. H. Lawrence, William Wolfe, Margaret Wolfe, William Inkhov, Dorothy Hopkins, Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Ernest Hemingway.

Personal life

Williams stayed close to his sister, Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young adult throughout his life. In 1943, when her behavior became more disturbing, she was exposed to a lobotomy, which required her to be hospitalized for the remainder of her life. Williams moved Rose to a private school just north of New York City, where he often visited her. He owed her a percentage interest in several of his most popular plays, the royalties from which were applied to her care. Williams' alcoholism and his reliance on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates may have been attributed to Rose's treatment.

Williams began investigating his homosexuality after having failed attempts at female relationships in the early 1930s. He began in New York City as a member of a gay community that included writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920–2010) and Windham's then-boyfriend Fred Melton. Williams began a friendship with Kip Kiernan (1918-1944), a young dancer he encountered in Provincetown, Massachusetts, in 1940. Williams was distraught when Kiernan told him to marry a woman. Kiernan's death at the age of 26 was another brutal blow.

Williams encountered Pancho Rodrlez, a Mexican heritage hotel clerk, on a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico. Rodrón was prone to jealousy and heavy drinking, and their friendship was tempestuous. Rodrez left New Mexico in February 1946 to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment. They lived and traveled together until late 1947, when Williams ended the relationship. Rodrn and Williams remained friends, but they were in touch as late as the 1970s.

Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a young man named "Rafaello" in Williams' Memoirs. For several years afterward, he had financial assistance to the younger man. Williams drew from this for his first book, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.

Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo (1921–1963) when he returned to New York in the spring. He was an occasional figure of Sicilian descent who served in the United States Navy during World War II. This was Williams' longest dating relationship, and it lasted 14 years before infidelities and heroin use on both directions ended it. Merlo, Williams' personal secretary, handled the majority of their domestic life. He brought a period of joy and stability, balancing the playwright's frequent bouts of depression. Williams feared that, as his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. Williams' best and most profitable years were spent with Merlo in a Manhattan apartment and a modest house in Key West, Florida. Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer only a few weeks after breaking up. Williams returned to him and cared for him until his death on September 20, 1963.

Williams descended into a period of virtually catatonic depression and increasing opioid use in the years following Merlo's death; as a result, several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health services have been initiated. He was admitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson, who is more popularly as Dr. Feelgood, who used increasing doses of amphetamines to mask his depression. Jacobson used prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to help him sleep. Williams converted to the Catholic Church at a time when he was influenced by his brother, a Roman Catholic convert, converting the Roman Catholic Church (though he later confessed that he never took seriously his conversion). He was never fully able to recover his earlier success or to completely overcome his reliance on prescription drugs.

Edwina Dakin died in 1980 at the age of 95. She had started failing during the early 1970s and was housed in a care facility from 1975 to 1975.

As Williams got older, he became increasingly lonely; he feared old age and losing his sexual attraction to younger gay men. Williams had a long friendship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and rising writer in his 20s, in the 1970s, when he was in his 60s. Williams had a profound love for Carroll and admiration for what he saw as the younger man's natural gifts. Carroll, along with Williams' sister Rose, was one of the two individuals to have been granted a bequest in Williams' will. Carroll's behavior was described as a mixture of "sweetness" and "beastliness," according to Williams. Since Carroll had a drug problem (as did Williams), people like Maria St. Just described the friendship as "destructive." Carroll played on his "acute loneliness" as an old gay man, according to Williams. Williams called Carroll a "twerp" when the two men first met in 1979, but they remained friends until Williams died four years later.

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Career

As Williams was struggling to gain production and an audience for his work in the late 1930s, he worked at a string of menial jobs that included a stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch in Laguna Beach, California. In 1939, with the help of his agent Audrey Wood, Williams was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels. It was produced in Boston, Massachusetts in 1940 and was poorly received.

Using some of the Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to put people to work. Williams lived for a time in New Orleans' French Quarter, including 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré. The building is now part of The Historic New Orleans Collection. The Rockefeller grant brought him to the attention of the Hollywood film industry and Williams received a six-month contract as a writer from the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio, earning $250 weekly.

During the winter of 1944–45, his memory play The Glass Menagerie developed from his 1943 short story "Portrait of a Girl in Glass", was produced in Chicago and garnered good reviews. It moved to New York where it became an instant hit and enjoyed a long Broadway run. Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams's greatest successes) said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." The Glass Menagerie won the award for the best play of the season, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.

The huge success of his next play, A Streetcar Named Desire, secured his reputation as a great playwright in 1947. During the late 1940s and 1950s, Williams began to travel widely with his partner Frank Merlo (1922 – September 21, 1963), often spending summers in Europe. He moved often to stimulate his writing, living in New York, New Orleans, Key West, Rome, Barcelona, and London. Williams wrote, "Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag."

Between 1948 and 1959 Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). By 1959, he had earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.

Williams's work reached wide audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were adapted as motion pictures. Later plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Summer and Smoke.

After the extraordinary successes of the 1940s and 1950s, he had more personal turmoil and theatrical failures in the 1960s and 1970s. Although he continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption, as well as occasional poor choices of collaborators. In 1963, his partner Frank Merlo died.

Consumed by depression over the loss, and in and out of treatment facilities while under the control of his mother and brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward. His plays Kingdom of Earth (1967), In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel (1969), Small Craft Warnings (1973), The Two Character Play (also called Out Cry, 1973), The Red Devil Battery Sign (1976), Vieux Carré (1978), Clothes for a Summer Hotel (1980), and others were all box office failures. Negative press notices wore down his spirit. His last play, A House Not Meant to Stand, was produced in Chicago in 1982. Despite largely positive reviews, it ran for only 40 performances.

Critics and audiences alike failed to appreciate Williams's new style and the approach to theater he developed during the 1970s.

In 1974, Williams received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1979, four years before his death, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

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