Tennessee Williams

 

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams; Columbus, United States, 1911 - New York, 1983) American playwright, poet and novelist. Member of a Southern Puritan family, from a very young age he felt a vocation for the theater. He began his studies at the University of Missouri, which he later continued at the University of Saint Louis (in the same state), and finally graduated in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Iowa. Years before, he had left his father's house due to disagreements with his parents. Parents, and to survive he had worked in the most varied trades. As a result of a disappointment in love, at the age of eleven he had begun to write, taking Anton Chekhov, D. H. Lawrence and the symbolist poet Hart Crane as models. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1940, the same year he unsuccessfully premiered his first play.

 

 

Tennessee Williams

 

His early pieces were performed by a group from the southern United States with whom he collaborated and with whom he agreed that "art is a form of anarchy and theater is an art form." He lived the bohemia of New Orleans, until, moved by a feeling of guilt towards his sister, who had suffered a lobotomy, he wrote what would be his first great theatrical success, The Glass Menagerie (1944), the beginning of a fervent production that it would establish him as the most important American playwright of his time.

 

His characters are frequently at odds with society and are torn between conflicts of great intensity, in which passions and guilt end up emerging in their original form, alien to social conventions. The intrigue is scarce in his works, which focus on the torn expression of the characters, immersed in an oppressive environment, and whose dialogues transmit poetry and sensuality.

 

The native South provides Tennessee Williams with the most frequent setting for his creations, as in his famous piece Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), which would be made into a film on several occasions, the first by director Richard Brooks (1958) , with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman in the cast. His works achieved international renown during the 1950s, especially A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which won him the Pulitzer Prize and would also be brought to the screen by Elia Kazan (1952); played by Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, the film deserved four Oscars. In fact, almost all the works of those years were made into movies, with scripts by Tennessee Williams himself in most cases, and his versions obtained great recognition.

 

Tennessee Williams is, surely, the playwright whose works have been seen the most on the screen, and this is because the characteristics for which they were so successful in the theater make them highly suitable for being transferred to celluloid: dramatic intensity, the dynamism of the action, the fluid dialogues, the psychological depth of the characters (especially the female ones) and their deep lyricism, which are the pillars on which the author relies to analyze the primitive violence that underlies American civilization.

 

However, after this golden period followed a hard time for Williams, a victim of painkillers and drugs, alone and overwhelmed by adverse criticism, in which he did not manage to write more than a few minor pieces. In 1967, he published the book of poems In the winter of cities and in 1975 his Memoirs, which are very interesting for learning about the panorama of contemporary North American theater. He died alone in a hotel room after swallowing a tube of insomnia pills. Throughout his life he received several awards, including twice the Pulitzer for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams continues to be regarded as one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century.

 

How to cite this article:

Fernandez, Tomas and Tamaro, Elena. "Biography of Tennessee Williams". In Biographies and Lives. The biographical encyclopedia online [Internet]. Barcelona, ​​Spain, 2004. Available at https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/w/williams.htm [Access date: November 14, 2022].

With affection,

Ruben