Tennessee Essays - Sewanee The University Of The South,

Tennessee Williams Written By who cares Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. He was the son of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina (Dakin) Williams. His father, Cornelius, was a traveling salesman who traveled constantly, and moved his family several times during the first decade of Williams' life. For the first seven years of Williams' life, he, his mother, and his sister Rose lived with Mrs. Williams father, the Episcopalian clergyman. Cornelius often abused Williams, by calling him ?Miss Nancy?, because he preferred books to sports. Williams' mother, Edwina Williams, 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 quite close to his older sister, Rose, who was institutionalized for schizophrenia for much of her life. The character Laura in the Glass Menagerie is thought to be based upon Rose. Williams was a sick and lonely child who endangered his frail health by forgoing sleep to write. The book Mrs. Williams wrote conveys a sense of family marked with anger, tension, and separateness, which might help explain some of the recurrent themes of Williams' plays. If home was ?not a pleasant refuge?, as Williams once said, ?The outside world was no better.? Williams remembered getting teased by gangs of boys at school, but he still went. He graduated from high school in January 1929. He then went on to the University of Missouri that fall. He was forced to drop out after his third year and go to work for his father in the shoe business. He worked at the shoe company for three years, and finally escaped by breaking down. A collapse that is attributed variously to exhaustion, heart palpitations, and the recurrence of childhood paralysis. He spent a recuperative summer with his grandparents in Memphis, Tennessee and enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He dropped out in 1937. He finally graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He spent the rest of his life writing. He choked to death February 24, 1983 in his suite at Hotel Elysee, in New York, New York. He was buried in St. Louis, Missouri. He began his life of writing and wondering, which went on ever since. Williams was becoming a writer. He began as a child, unlike most writers, in Remember Me Tom. Williams once said, ?I write from my own tensions, for me, this is a form of therapy.? In a 1960 interview with Arthur Gelb in the New York Times, Williams spoke of his, ?Desire for success? : ?I want to reach a mass audience.? Williams was not only a ?poet?, sending messages of his own isolation out to the world, but the professional writer in search of an audience, and success. In 1927, pretending to be an unhappily married traveling salesman, the sixteen year old Williams won third place in a smart set contest, ?Can A Good Wife Be A Good Sport; his entry, which answers no to the question, is reprinted in Remember Me To Tom. In 1928, his first professionally published story appeared in the August issue of Weird Tales. In 1929, as a freshman in college, already thinking of himself as a playwright, Williams announced his ambition to go to the school of journalism. Tennessee Williams' career as a playwright got under way in 1935, during the summer he spent in Memphis. The production of Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! gave Williams the motivation to turn out more plays. The play, co-authored by Dorothy Shapiro, a Memphis friend, was never printed. In 1936, Williams became associated with The Mummers, a lively St. Louis theater group under the direction of Willard Holland, whom Williams praised in his introduction to 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. For them he wrote a one-actor headline to serve as a curtain-raiser for an Armistice Day production of Irwin Shaw's Bury The Dead. Within the next two years, The Mummers produced two full-length Williams plays, Candles In The Sun, and The Pugitive Kind. A third play, Not About Nightingales, was about to be done in 1938 when the group died of economic failure. In 1939, Williams, who by that time had dropped the Thomas Lanier, bundled up most of his collected works, including a group of one-actors called American Blues, and shipped them off to the group theater contest. The judges- Harold Clurman, Irwin Shaw, and Molly Day Thacher- gave him a special award for ?A group of three sketches which constitute a full-length play.? The most important Tennessee Essays - Sewanee The University Of The South, Tennessee Williams Written By who cares Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. He was the son of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina (Dakin) Williams. His father, Cornelius, was a traveling salesman who traveled constantly, and moved his family several times during the first decade of Williams' life. For the first seven years of Williams' life, he, his mother, and his sister Rose lived with Mrs. Williams father, the Episcopalian clergyman. Cornelius often abused Williams, by calling him ?Miss Nancy?, because he preferred books to sports. Williams' mother, Edwina Williams, 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 quite close to his older sister, Rose, who was institutionalized for schizophrenia for much of her life. The character Laura in the Glass Menagerie is thought to be based upon Rose. Williams was a sick and lonely child who endangered his frail health by forgoing sleep to write. The book Mrs. Williams wrote conveys a sense of family marked with anger, tension, and separateness, which might help explain some of the recurrent themes of Williams' plays. If home was ?not a pleasant refuge?, as Williams once said, ?The outside world was no better.? Williams remembered getting teased by gangs of boys at school, but he still went. He graduated from high school in January 1929. He then went on to the University of Missouri that fall. He was forced to drop out after his third year and go to work for his father in the shoe business. He worked at the shoe company for three years, and finally escaped by breaking down. A collapse that is attributed variously to exhaustion, heart palpitations, and the recurrence of childhood paralysis. He spent a recuperative summer with his grandparents in Memphis, Tennessee and enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He dropped out in 1937. He finally graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He spent the rest of his life writing. He choked to death February 24, 1983 in his suite at Hotel Elysee, in New York, New York. He was buried in St. Louis, Missouri. He began his life of writing and wondering, which went on ever since. Williams was becoming a writer. He began as a child, unlike most writers, in Remember Me Tom. Williams once said, ?I write from my own tensions, for me, this is a form of therapy.? In a 1960 interview with Arthur Gelb in the New York Times, Williams spoke of his, ?Desire for success? : ?I want to reach a mass audience.? Williams was not only a ?poet?, sending messages of his own isolation out to the world, but the professional writer in search of an audience, and success. In 1927, pretending to be an unhappily married traveling salesman, the sixteen year old Williams won third place in a smart set contest, ?Can A Good Wife Be A Good Sport; his entry, which answers no to the question, is reprinted in Remember Me To Tom. In 1928, his first professionally published story appeared in the August issue of Weird Tales. In 1929, as a freshman in college, already thinking of himself as a playwright, Williams announced his ambition to go to the school of journalism. Tennessee Williams' career as a playwright got under way in 1935, during the summer he spent in Memphis. The production of Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay! gave Williams the motivation to turn out more plays. The play, co-authored by Dorothy Shapiro, a Memphis friend, was never printed. In 1936, Williams became associated with The Mummers, a lively St. Louis theater group under the direction of Willard Holland, whom Williams praised in his introduction to 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. For them he wrote a one-actor headline to serve as a curtain-raiser for an Armistice Day production of Irwin Shaw's Bury The Dead. Within the next two years, The Mummers produced two full-length Williams plays, Candles In The Sun, and The Pugitive Kind. A third play, Not About Nightingales, was about to be done in 1938 when the group died of economic failure. In 1939, Williams, who by that time had dropped the Thomas Lanier, bundled up most of his collected works, including a group of one-actors called American Blues, and shipped them off to the group theater contest. The judges- Harold Clurman, Irwin Shaw, and Molly Day Thacher- gave him a special award for ?A group of three sketches which constitute a full-length play.? The most important