"Tennessee" Williams
Posted by: 
BruceS
N 38° 42.178 W 090° 14.208
15S E 740288 N 4287439
Grave of one America's most renowned playwrights of the twentieth century. Grave site is located in Calvary Cemetery in north St. Louis.
Waymark Code: WMAQX
Location: Missouri, United States
Date Posted: 04/17/2006
Views: 52
Thomas
Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911. He lived a
few years in Clarksdale, Mississippi before moving to St. Louis in 1918. When he
was 16 he had his first success with writing winning a third place in a writing
contest. In 1929 he started at the University of Missouri with limited success
and in 1931 he began work in a shoe company. After 6 years he had his first play
Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay was produced in Memphis, it is this success
which is viewed as his real beginning of his literary and stage career.
Building on this experience, he had two plays Candles to the Sun and
The Fugitive Kind were produced in St. Louis in 1937. He enrolled for a
short time at Washington University, St. Louis, he then entered the University
of Iowa, and graduated in 1938. It was during his college years that he acquired
the nickname "Tennessee" because of his southern accent and his father's
background in Tennessee. During the World War II years he had small successes
with American Blues and Battle of Angels. Near the close of the
war in 1944, his first major successful play The Glass Menagerie with an
excellent run in Chicago and a year later on Broadway. The play won the New York
Drama Critics' Circle award as the best play of the
season.
After the success of The Glass Menagerie, he had success over the next
eight years landing the following plays on Broadway A Streetcar Named Desire
for which he received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948, Summer and Smoke,
A Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real. His reputation on Broadway
remained at high level but broader renown came in 1950 when The Glass
Menagerie and again in 1951 when A Streetcar Named Desire were made
into motion pictures.
Over the next thirty years, dividing his time between homes in Key West, New
Orleans, and New York, his reputation continued to grow and he saw many more of
his works produced on Broadway and made into films, including such works as
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955),
Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana.
Over the years he wrote nearly 80 plays, 3 novels, 6 short stories, and
2 works of poetry.
He died in New York city on February 24, 1983.