Biography
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi, was one of the supreme American dramatists of the twentieth century. Williams drew on his traumatic Southern family history throughout his work—his mother's social pretensions, his father's cruelty, and his sister Rose's schizophrenia and lobotomy. His breakthrough came with The Glass Menagerie (1944). A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) won the Pulitzer Prize and established him as the defining dramatist of Southern decline; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) won a second Pulitzer. Other major plays include Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Suddenly, Last Summer (1958), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Williams's later career suffered from alcoholism, depression, and critical rejection of his increasingly experimental late plays. He died in New York in 1983.
On Stagelog
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