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Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams Tennessee Williams was born Thomas
Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. ...
Tennessee Williams. If you go to The Mississippi ... One of the writers featured
is Tennessee Williams. Born Thomas Lanier Williams on March ...
Parallels of Tennessee Williams? Life and The Glass Menagerie. ... The character of
Tom Wingfield is nearly autobiographical of Tennessee Williams himself. ...
Tennessee Williams. ?Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in
his plays is in his life,? Elia Kazan said of Tennessee Williams. ...
Discuss Tennessee Williams' use of symbolism in. Discuss Tennessee ... vulnerability.
Tennessee Williams use of symbols visualises this. Overall ...
Submitted by boompsie on April 25, 2007
Category: Biographies
Words: 372 | Pages: 2
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Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi. The second of three children, his family life was full of tension. His parents, a shoe salesman and the daughter of a minister, often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his sister Rose.
In 1929, he was admitted to the University of Missouri where he saw a production of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts and decided to become a playwright. But his degree was interrupted when his father forced him to withdraw from college and work at the International Shoe Company. There he worked with a young man named Stanley Kowalski who would later resurface as a character in A Streetcar Named Desire.
In 1944, what many consider to be his best play, The Glass Menagerie, had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later burst its way onto Broadway. The play tells the story of Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda who tries to make a match between Laura and the gentleman caller. Many people believe that Tennessee used his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play.
The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.
He received his first Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire, and reached an even larger world-wide audience in 1950 and 1951 when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into major motion pictures. Later plays which were also made into motion pictures include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (for which he earned a second Pulitzer Prize in 1955), Orpheus Descending, and Night of the Iguana.
Tennessee Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947 while living in New Orleans. Merlo, a second generation Sicilian American who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, was a steadying influence in Williams' chaotic life. But in 1961, Merlo died of Lung Cancer and the playwright went into a deep depression...
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