The VERB - March '08

~ Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi.

~ His mother was the daughter of a minister. His father was a shoe salesman.

~ Williams loved books and was not the least bit interested in sports. This, he felt, was the reason he never won his father's approval.

~ In 1918 the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri.

~ At the age of 16, Williams won third prize and received five dollars for an essay, “Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?” in Smart Set. A year later, he published “The Vengeance of Nitocris” in Weird Tales

~ In 1929, he entered the University of Missouri. There, he saw a production of Henrik Ibsens's Ghosts, and decided to become a playwright.

~ His degree was interrupted, however, when his father forced him to withdraw from college and work at the International Shoe Company.

~ In 1935, his first play, Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay, was produced. In 1937 two other plays followed, Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind. Williams then entered the University of Iowa and graduated in 1938.

~ Some historians say his Southern accent and poverty made him a target of his schoolmates who gave him the name "Tennessee." Others say he changed it because Tennessee was his father's home state.

~ In 1939, the young playwright received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant.

~ Near the close of the war in 1944, The Glass Menagerie had a successful run in Chicago and a year later burst onto Broadway. The play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award as the Best Play of the Season.

~ Over the next eight years, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tattoo and Camino Real hit Broadway.

~ In 1948 Tennessee received his first Pulitzer Prize for Streetcar.

~ In 1950 The Glass Menagerie was made into a motion picture. The following year, A Streetcar Named Desire was filmed.

~ Over the next thirty years, dividing his time between homes in Key West, New Orleans and New York, Tennessee saw many more of his works produced on Broadway and made into films, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (his second Pulitzer Prize), Orpheus Descending and Night of the Iguana.

~ Williams struggled with depression and an addiction to alcohol and prescription drugs. He lived with the constant fear that he would go insane like his sister Rose.

~ At the age of 72, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap after a heavy night of drinking at the Hotel Elysee in New York. He is buried in St. Louis, Missouri.