Tennessee Williams Influences

Tennessee Williams was an American playwright known for his candid portrayal of human nature and relationships that often broached taboo topics. The height of his career was in the late 1940s and 1950s; his first well-known work, The Glass Menagerie, brought him notoriety in 1945. Williams was “simultaneously praised and denounced for addressing raw subject matter in a straightforward realistic way” (American Masters). Thomas Lanier Williams III, known to us as Tennessee Williams, was born on March 26th, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. His childhood in Mississippi and Missouri and young adulthood spent in New Orleans are represented in his work, as are his relationships with his family and his views of himself, including his experiences as
Williams became a student of journalism at the University of Missouri in 1929, but his father forced him to withdraw after a short time. (Biography.com Editors) Withdrawn from school, Williams worked as a clerk for his father’s shoe company, a position which he greatly disliked. (American Masters) It was during this time that Williams suffered a nervous breakdown after dealing with a term of depression. This period of his life was later embodied in the experiences of the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Williams then spent time in Memphis to recover and returned to St. Louis to reenroll at Washington University in 1937. He graduated the following year with a degree in English. (Biography.com Editors) His early plays include Fugitive Kind, Spring Storm, and Me Vaysha in 1937. It was later described that “although traumatic experiences plagued his life, Williams was able to press "the nettle of neurosis" to his heart and produce art.” (Poetry
(Schuessler) Williams’s lifestyle was characterized by his use of alcohol and drugs throughout his life; towards the end of his career his critics even dismissed him “as a washed up – and often embarrassingly drugged out – relic of the past” (Schuessler). However, he continued to write until his death in 1983 “with a determination that verged at times almost on desperation” (Poetry Foundation). In addition to his plays, he also wrote three volumes of short stories, two novels, two volumes of poetry, and memoirs. His life was often the subject of gossip and was even embellished by Williams himself; a “fog of gossip and sensationalism surrounded Williams’s life, much of it stoked by the playwright’s own scandalous (and often unreliable) 1975 memoir” (Schuessler). Throughout his career, Tennessee Williams earned two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.
Williams was hospitalized in 1969 for his drug and alcohol addiction. These habits were thought to be a response to many poor reviews from critics during that decade. Even though he turned out numerous works following his release from the hospital, including Memoirs in 1975, a relapse of his extreme habits from the 1960s eventually took his life. He was found in a hotel room in New York City, encircled by wine and pills, his vices,