Tennessee+Williams

one of America's most famous playwrights
 * Thomas Lanier Williams**

March 26, 1911 to February 23, 1983


 * Born in Columbus, Mississippi
 * Parents: Cornelius a traveling salesman for a large shoe manufacturer, at turns distant and abusive. and Edwina Dakin Williams, an aggressive woman, obsessed by her fantasies of genteel Southern living.
 * Siblings: older sister, Rose, emotionally disturbed and destined to spend most of her life in mental institutions,and younger brother, Dakin, whom his father repeatedly favored over both of the older children.


 * critical and audience recognition in America and abroad


 * drama: conflicts between sexuality, society, and Christianity, played themselves out in his life as well.
 * spent almost all of his life as a wanderer--a sexual and religious outcast


 * Williams¹s life ended in a place that shared the name of the apartment building in which one of his best-known characters, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, met her figurative end. He died in the Elysee Hotel in New York; the name of the apartment building in Streetcar is Elysian Fields. It is perhaps appropriate that Williams died in a hotel--the traditional bivouac of wanderers and outcasts--rather than in his home at Key West or in New Orleans. He was buried in St. Louis, in a Catholic ceremony, at the request of his brother.


 * claimed that all of his major plays fit into the "memory play" format he described in his production notes for The Glass Menagerie. The memory play is a three-part structure: (1) a character experiences something profound; (2) that experience causes what Williams terms an "arrest of time," a situation in which time literally loops upon itself; and (3) the character must re-live that profound experience (caught in a sort of mobius loop of time) until she or he makes sense of it. The overarching theme for his plays, he claimed, is the negative impact that conventional society has upon the "sensitive nonconformist individual."

With their emphasis on the irrational, the desperation of humanity in a universe in which cosmic laws do not work, and their tragi-comic examination of the conflicts between the gentility of old Southern values and the brute force of new, Northern values, Williams's plays fit nicely into a genre critics call "Southern Gothic." He shares this field with such literary lights as Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, who, like Williams, struggled with the macabre and eccentric natures of individuals in America's South. Although, like Faulkner, Williams spent much of his adult life in New York, his work focuses on the Southern experience.

excerpted from an essay by Darryl E. Haley, Assistant Professor of English East Tennessee State University

[]