Tennessee

Williams

Biography

1911 - 1983

American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence often underlie a pervasive atmosphere of Southern romantic gentility.

1911 -- born in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26 to Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Williams. Father was a shoe salesman and his mother the daughter of a minister.

1911-18 -- lived in Clarksdale, Mississippi

1927 -- Won third prize for an essay in Smart Set magazine at the age of 16.

1928 -- published "The Vengeance of Nitocris" in Weird Tales.

1929 -- entered the University of Missouri

1931 -- quit college and worked in a St. Louis shoe company. The next six years are a time he calls "a living death" and escapes the depression by writing plays, stories, and poems.

1937 -- first play is produced in Memphis, Cairo, Shaghai, Bombay. Entered Washington University in St. Louis and dropped out

1938 -- graduated from the University of Iowa

1939 -- received a $1,000 Rockefeller grant and produced American Blues.

1944 -- The Glass Menegerie is first produced in Chicago and a year later on Broadway. Won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.

1945-1953 -- had Broadway plays every season and Williams reaches the peak of his career with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947-Pulitzer Prize), Summer and Smoke (1948), A Rose Tattoo (1951), and Camino Real (1953).

1953 -- moves between homes in New Orleans, Key West, and New York. Reputation continues to grow

1955-61 -- Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955-Second Pulitzer Prize), Orpheus Descending (1958), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)Night of the Iguana (1961)

1969 -- suffered a mental and physical breakdown

1983 -- Died at the Hotel Elysee in New York, suffocating on a medicine bottle cap

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