Tennessee Williams
Thomas Lanier Williams III (1911 - 1983), known as Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright most known for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Williams won numerous awards, included the Tony Award (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize (1955).
- Tennessee Williams: BiographyTennessee Williams was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose works include 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'
- Tennessee Williams: Poetry FoundationMore clearly than with most authors, the facts of Williams’s life reveal the origins of the material he crafted into his best works.
- Tennessee Williams: BritannicaTennessee Williams, original name Thomas Lanier Williams, (born March 26, 1911, Columbus, Miss., U.S.—died Feb. 25, 1983, New York City), American dramatist whose plays reveal a world of human frustration in which sex and violence underlie an atmosphere of romantic gentility.
Research & Reference
- Tennessee Williams: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Tennessee Williams. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
- Tennessee Williams CollectionExplore drafts of plays, journals, correspondence, and photographs from one of America’s pioneering dramatists.
Streaming Media
- Tennessee Williams and the American SouthThis outstanding program traces the life of Tennessee Williams, revisiting the locations in the Southern states that were his inspiration. Scenes from Williams’ most memorable works, including The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, evoke the atmosphere, characters, and conflicts of the Deep South, while footage of a rare television interview and a dramatic reenactment of the life of the young Tennessee provide new insights into one of America’s greatest playwrights.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Tennessee Williams: Plays
Tennessee Williams's explosive, often violent, plays shattered conventional proprieties and transformed the American stage. They inspired some of the most famous productions and performances in theatrical and film history, and they continue to grip audiences all over the world. Now, in an authoritative two-volume edition, The Library of America collects the plays that define Williams's extraordinary range and achievement. This first volume begins with the stunning rediscovered plays of Williams's early career: Spring Storm, a tragedy of provincial longing that prefigures the mood and language of his later work, and Not About Nightingales, a stark prison drama, produced in 1998 to international acclaim, that resounds with the playwright's outraged idealism. With the autobiographical The Glass Menagerie in 1944, Williams attained what he later called "the catastrophe of success," a success made all the greater by A Streetcar Named Desire, his most famous play and one of the most influential works of modern American literature. Forging an idiom that uniquely blended lyricism and brutality, a tragic sense of life and a genius for comic observation, he continued to revolutionize the American theater with a series of masterpieces: the poignant and melancholy Summer and Smoke, the light-hearted erotic comedy The Rose Tattoo, the sprawling and surrealistic Camino Real, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the Pulitzer Prize–winning portrayal of a ruthless family struggle. This volume also contains Battle of Angels (an early version of Orpheus Descending), and a selection of Williams's one-act plays, including 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, The Property Is Condemned, and I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix, a meditation on the life and work of D. H. Lawrence. This edition includes a newly researched chronology of Tennessee Williams's life, explanatory notes (including cast lists of many of the original productions), and an essay on the texts.
A Streetcar Named Desire
After being exiled from her hometown of Auriol, Mississippi for seducing a seventeen-year-old boy at the school where she taught English, Blanche DuBois arrives unexpectedly at the New Orleans home of her pregnant sister Stella Kowalski and her Stella's husband Stanley. Stanley, both repulsed by and attracted to Blanche, discovers that she has mortgaged property left to both sisters and spent all the money. He sets about discovering everything else he can about her past, and tension between Blanche and Stanley is further intensified when Blanche begins dating one of Stanley's poker buddies.
Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate.With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life--his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin--Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams's plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen.The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life.Lahr captures not just Williams's tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.Winner of the 2015 Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre BiographyAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memorial AwardChicago Tribune Best Books of 2014USA Today 10 Books We Loved ReadingWashington Post 10 Best Books of 2014
Critical Essays on Tennessee Williams
Covers the works of playwright, novelist, and poet Tennessee Williams (1911--1983).