Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie out of his own family and then spent forty years writing versions of his sister. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi to a travelling shoe salesman who despised him and a mother who had been a Southern belle; the family moved to St Louis into a tenement, and the collision between the genteel manner and the actual apartment is the material of the first play. His sister Rose was diagnosed schizophrenic and lobotomised in 1943 while he was away, an operation their mother authorised, and he never forgave it or stopped writing about it. The Glass Menagerie opened in 1944 after a decade of failure and poverty; A Streetcar Named Desire followed in 1947 and won the Pulitzer, as did Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. He wrote The Rose Tattoo for Anna Magnani and waited years for her English. His long relationship with Frank Merlo ended with Merlo's death from cancer in 1963, after which he wrote for twenty years through drink and drugs to reviews that were consistently hostile. He was open about being homosexual in decades when that was a professional risk, and the plays are full of people destroyed by the gap between what they are and what they must appear to be. He died alone in a New York hotel. He left his estate to a university on condition it fund Rose's care. Elia Kazan directed four of his plays and pressed him into rewriting the third act of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a version Williams published alongside his own so readers could choose. Marlon Brando took the part of Stanley Kowalski in Streetcar on stage and then on film, and the performance changed American acting. The Night of the Iguana in 1961 was his last major critical success. He died in 1983 in the Hotel Elysee in New York, the immediate cause recorded as choking on the cap of a bottle of eye drops. The estate went to the University of the South at Sewanee, where it still funds writing.

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