Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams
Birthday	Sunday, March 26, 1911
Birthplace	Columbus, Mississippi, United States
Died	Friday, February 25, 1983
Nationality	American

Williams, Tennessee (b. Thomas Lanier Williams)

(1911–83) playwright; born in Columbus, Miss. From an old Tennessee family (he adopted his first name by 1939 while in New Orleans), he was raised under the influence of his clergyman-grandfather. Moving with his family to St. Louis in 1913, he went on to several colleges, graduating from the State University of Iowa in 1938. He moved around the country for many years, working at odd jobs while he wrote short plays and getting occasional productions in community theaters; in 1943 he briefly worked as a scriptwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He gained sudden success with the New York production of The Glass Menagerie (1945) and his next and greatest success came with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which won a Pulitzer Prize. Although Williams' life was marked by personal disarray, mental stress, and drug addiction, he enjoyed long-term relationships with male companions and continued to be productive. In 1968 he converted to Catholicism. His later plays include Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1961). He also published two novels and a fair amount of poetry. Several of his plays were made into successful movies, but his later works were not well received and he became disaffected from the New York professional theater. He died by choking on the cap of a bottle of pills. His best work is distinguished by a poetry, intensity, and compassion that guarantee him a permanent place as a major artist-dramatist.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Williams, Tennessee

(real name Thomas Lanier Williams). Born Mar. 26,1914, in Columbus, Miss. American playwright.

Williams studied at the universities of Missouri and Iowa between 1935 and 1938. As a playwright, he shows a critical perception of reality, as in The Glass Menagerie (1944), and a particular sympathy for the doomed protagonists of such plays as A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Orpheus Descending (1957). The influence of naturalism and modernism, as well as of the idealist tendencies in modern philosophy, is especially evident in The Night of the Iguana (1961) and the plays in his collection Dragon Country (1970). In the staging of his works, Williams, who espouses the concept of a “plastic theater, ” makes prominent use of mise-en-scène, lighting, and musical effects to reinforce the text.

Williams also has written short stories, some of which have been collected in Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974). In both theme and style, they are closely related to his dramatic works.

WORKS

Four Plays. London, 1956.
Five Plays. London, 1962.
In Russian translation:
“Stekliannyi zverinets” i eshche deviat’p’es. Moscow, 1967.
“Sladkogolosaia ptitsa iunosti.” Teatr, 1975, no. 12.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, part 2. Moscow, 1971.
Maxwell, G. Tennessee Williams and Friends. Cleveland-New York [1965],