Tennessee Williams Is One Of The Great American Writers

Tennessee Williams ranks after Eugene O'Neill as the greatest playwright in the history of American letters, and a little higher than such contemporary masters as Edward Albee and August Wilson. Though he never won a Nobel Prize as did O'Neil, Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes, for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and should have won for The Glass Menagerie (1944) had the Pulitzer Prize for Drama been awarded in 1944. His other major plays include Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). In addition to his two Pulitzers, Tennessee Williams was nominated four times for the Tony Award for Best Play, wining once, for The Rose Tattoo. (His last Best Play Tony Award nomination came 16 years after his death, for Not About Nightingales.) He also won four Drama Desk Critics Awards.

According to a 1962 TIME Magazine cover story published at the height of his success, he had made $6 million (over $40 million, when adjusted for inflation) from his writing, and was enjoying an annual income of $200,000 a year (about $1.4 million). Having soared to the heavenly heights of fame and fortune, Tennessee Williams fell, Icarus-like, within a year, with the flop of his play The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. He never recovered, professionally or psychologically, from the failure of that play and its disastrous 1964 revival. Like one of the heroines or male protagonists of his plays, he was shattered and left in a twilight life.

He was born Thomas Lanier Williams, III in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911, to Cornelius Williams, a traveling shoe salesman who denigrated his sensitive son, who was homosexual, as "Miss Nancy," and the former Edwina Dakin, the daughter of an Episcopal priest, who like many of her son's heroines, fancied herself as a Southern belle. He first began to write while afflicted with paralysis as a child, which affected him between the ages of five and seven, turning him into an invalid for two years. At the age of 13, his mother -- who encouraged his writing -- gave him a typewriter.