Tennessee Williams

American Decades, December 16, 1998Updated: May 26, 2005

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Born: March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, United States

Died: February 25, 1983 in New York, New York, United States
Other Names: Williams, Thomas Lanier
Nationality: American
Occupation: Playwright
One of the Greatest American Dramatists. Along with Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams is
acknowledged as one of the two greatest American dramatists of the post-World War II era. His stature is
based almost entirely upon works he completed during the first half of his career. Williams' lyrical style
and his thematic concerns are distinctive in American theater; his material came almost exclusively from
his inner life and was little influenced by other dramatists or by contemporary events.
Family Background. Williams once told an interviewer, "My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has
no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life." Critics have
made much use of Williams' family background as a means of analyzing his plays. Williams' father,
Cornelius, was a businessman from a prominent Tennessee family who traveled constantly and moved his
family several times during the first decade of Williams' life. Cornelius was often abusive toward his son,
calling him "Miss Nancy" because the child preferred books to sports. His mother, Edwina, was a southern
belle and the daughter of a clergyman; she is frequently cited as the inspiration for the domineering and
possessive mother figures in Williams' plays. Williams was very close to his older sister, Rose, who was
institutionalized for schizophrenia for much of her life. The character of Laura in The Glass Menagerie is
based upon this beloved sister. Williams began writing early in life, had his first works published in a
magazine at the age of twelve, and by the time he was twenty, he had decided to become a dramatist. A
lonely and sickly child, he sought an escape in writing and often endangered his already frail health by
foregoing sleep in order to write. The derivation of the name Tennessee is uncertain: Williams claimed he
adopted the name because his father's family was active in the making of the State of Tennessee; it is
also said that he acquired the name, due to his southern accent, at the University of Iowa; others believe
he changed his name in order to distinguish his early, admittedly puerile poetry from his later work; Signi
L. Falk noted that Williams changed his name because he felt his given name sounded too formidable.
The Glass Menagerie. In 1944 Williams captured the public's attention with his first major play, The
Glass Menagerie. Tom, the narrator of the play, dreams of being a writer and is said to represent Williams.
Tom's sister, Laura, is crippled both physically and socially. His mother, Amanda, is a fading southern belle
who lives in the past. The action of the play concerns Amanda persuading Tom to bring to the house a
"gentleman caller," whom she hopes will marry Laura and provide for her future. Tom brings a man who is
already engaged, upsetting his mother and causing Laura to retreat more deeply into her fantasy world of
records and her glass animal collection. Tom then leaves his family, as his father had before him, to
pursue his own destiny. The simplicity ofMenagerie's plot is counterbalanced by lyrical language and
profuse symbolism, which some critics consider overwhelming. However, this emotionally compelling play
was extremely popular, and Williams followed its formula in his later work. Laura is the typical Williams

heroine in that she is too fragile to live in the real world. Laura's and Amanda's escapes from the world
through fantasy and living in the past, respectively, foreshadow later plays where the characters escape
through alcohol and sex.
A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams established an international reputation with A Streetcar Named
Desire,which many critics consider his best work. The play begins with the arrival of Blanche DuBois at
the home of her sister, Stella, and her brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski, a lusty, crude, working-class man.
Blanche has presided over the decay and loss of her family's estate and has witnessed the suicide of her
young husband. She comes to Stella seeking comfort and security but clashes with Stanley. While Stella
is in the hospital giving birth, Stanley rapes Blanche, causing her to lose what little is left of her sanity. At
the end, Blanche is committed to a sanitarium. In Streetcar, Williams used Blanche and Stanley to
illustrate dichotomies and conflicts, several of which recur in his plays: illusion vs. truth, weakness vs.
strength, and the power of sexuality to both destroy and redeem. But he does not allow either character to
become one-dimensional or to dominate the audience's sympathies. Stanley's brutishness is balanced by
his love for Stella, his dislike of hypocrisy, and his justifiable anger at Blanche's mockery of him and her
intrusion on his home. Blanche's hypocrisy--her pretentious refinement despite her promiscuity--is
balanced by the ordeals she has endured and by her gentleness and capacity for love. Williams' skillful
balancing of Stanley and Blanche, and the qualities each represents, has provided subject matter for
many scholarly essays and has earned the admiration of critics.
Plays of the 1940s and 50s. Although none of Williams' later plays attained the universal critical and
popular acclaim of Streetcar and Menagerie, several works from the 1940s and 1950s are considered
significant achievements in American drama. In Summer and Smoke (1947), Williams continued his
exploration of the tension between the spirit and the flesh begun in Streetcar. In The Rose Tattoo (1950),
one of his most lighthearted plays, he celebrated the life-affirming power of sexuality. Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, which is set on a Mississippi delta plantation, revolves around lies and self-deception. This play
involves some of Williams' most memorable characters: Brick, a homosexual, who drinks to forget his guilt
over the death of a lover; Maggie, his wife, who struggles "like a cat on a hot tin roof" to save their
marriage; and Big Daddy, whose impending death from cancer prompts his family to compete for the
inheritance. The Night of the Iguana, which Williams said is about "how to get beyond despair and still
live," was his last play to win a major prize and gain critical and popular favor.
Later Work Marked by Negative Reception. Later in his career the "emotional currents" of Williams' life
were at a low ebb. Such plays as Suddenly Last Summer (1958) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1956), which
are filled with violence, grotesquerie, and black comedy, reflect Williams' traumatic emotional state at the
time of their composition. In his Memoirs (1975), Williams referred to the 1960s as his "Stoned Age," and
he explained in an interview that "after 1955, specifically after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ... I needed [drugs,
caffeine, and alcohol] to give me the physical energy to work.... But I am a compulsive writer. I have tried
to stop working and I am bored to death." Williams continued to produce plays until his death, but critical
reception became increasingly negative. Much of Williams' later work consisted of rewriting his earlier
plays and stories, and his new material showed little artistic development, according to critics. Gore Vidal
said in 1976: "Tennessee is the sort of writer who does not develop; he simply continues. By the time he
was an adolescent he had his themes.... I am not aware that any new information (or feeling?) has got
through to him in the [past] twenty-eight years." It was not only a lack of new themes that caused critics to
denounce Williams' later work, but the absence of freshness and dramatic soundness in his treatment of
these themes. Gerald Weales, a noted Williams scholar, voiced the critical consensus when he said:
"Audiences have withdrawn from Williams--I suspect, not because his style has changed or his concerns
altered, but because in his desperate need to cry out he has turned away from the sturdy dramatic

containers which once gave the cry resonance and has settled for pale imitations of familiar stage
images ... and has substituted lyric argument for dramatic language."
Transformed the American Stage. Williams was subject to much negative and even hostile criticism
during his lifetime. Many of the qualities for which he is faulted are praised in his other works. His lyricism
and use of symbols are hallmarks of such plays as Streetcar, but in other plays critics accuse him of being
overly sentimental or heavy-handed. Williams is lauded for his compassionate understanding of the
spiritually downtrodden, but he has also been accused of crossing the line between sympathetic interest
and perverse sensationalism. Although critics are nearly unanimous in expressing their disappointment
and sadness that the mastery of Williams' early work was not continued in his later plays, they are quick
to point out that Williams' contributions to American theater has been remarkable. This opinion was
expressed in an editorial in The Nation: "The plays for which Williams will be remembered ... are not the
`first act' of some mysteriously unfinished life in art--they are that life. They transformed the American
stage, they purified our language, they changed the way we see ourselves. None of his later plays,
however erratic they may have been, diminish that accomplishment by so much as a hair."

Further Readings
Bigsby, C. W. E., A Critical Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Drama, three volumes,
(Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Broussard, Louis, American Drama: Contemporary Allegory from Eugene O'Neill to Tennessee
Williams, (University of Oklahoma Press, 1962).
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994-2001 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage
Learning.
Source Citation
"Tennessee Williams." American Decades. Ed. Judith S. Baughman, et al. Detroit: Gale, 1998.Biography in
Context. Web. 9 July 2016.

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