A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)
Faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois clashes with her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski; Pulitzer Prize 1948
Literature · Playwrights
Tennessee Williams
1911–1983 · American
Southern Gothic; poetic realism
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi, wrote lyrical, emotionally charged plays about fragile, desperate characters in the American South. The Glass Menagerie made his name, and A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof both won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Many of his plays became celebrated films.
How to spot them
- ▸Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski in New Orleans; 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers'
- ▸Maggie 'the Cat', Brick and Big Daddy, who rails against 'mendacity'
- ▸Laura Wingfield's glass menagerie and its unicorn
- ▸Real name Thomas Lanier Williams; born in Columbus, Mississippi; lived in Key West
- ▸His sister Rose, who underwent a lobotomy, inspired several fragile heroines
Key works
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
Maggie, her alcoholic husband Brick and the dying plantation owner Big Daddy; Pulitzer Prize 1955
The Glass Menagerie (1944)
Memory play narrated by Tom Wingfield about his mother Amanda and his shy sister Laura
Suddenly, Last Summer (1958)
Mrs Venable wants her niece Catherine lobotomised to suppress the truth about her son Sebastian's death
The Night of the Iguana (1961)
A defrocked minister, Shannon, at a run-down hotel in Mexico
Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)
Gigolo Chance Wayne returns to his Gulf Coast home town with a fading film star
The Rose Tattoo (1951)
A Sicilian-American widow on the Gulf Coast; won the Tony Award for Best Play
Key ideas
- The 'memory play' (The Glass Menagerie), using lighting, music and a narrator to evoke the past
- Plastic theatre: expressionist staging in place of strict realism
- Sympathy for outsiders, illusions and sexual desire in a repressive South
Quick-fire facts
- •Born Thomas Lanier Williams III on 26 March 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi; grew up largely in St Louis
- •Graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938 and adopted the name Tennessee around 1939
- •The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago in 1944 and on Broadway in 1945
- •Elia Kazan directed Streetcar on Broadway (1947) with Marlon Brando as Stanley, and the 1951 film
- •Won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice: A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955)
- •His long-term partner was Frank Merlo
- •Died on 25 February 1983 at the Hotel Elysée in New York, having choked on a bottle cap
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Tennessee Williams
- John Lahr — Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh