Playwright

Tennessee Williams is considered to be one of the greatest writers of the Twentieth Century and one of the greatest playwrights of all time. He was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi to Edwina Dakin Williams and Cornelius Coffin Williams, joining his older sister, Rose Isabel Williams. While Cornelius worked as a traveling salesman, Edwina, Tom and Rose lived with Edwina’s parents, the Episcopal minister Rev. Walter E. Dakin and Rose Otte Dakin, until Tom was 7. While Cornelius dropped in and out, the family moved from Columbus to parishes in Nashville, Tennessee and Canton, Mississippi before arriving in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1917, The Dakins lived in Clarksdale, where Mr. Dakin was rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church, until his retirement in 1931. Cornelius took a desk job at the International Shoe Company, moving his wife and son to St. Louis in 1918, Edwina gave birth to their third child, Dakin in 1919. After the move, Tom and his sister Rose took turns staying with their grandparents in Clarksdale, sometimes for an entire school year. Tom began to write at the age of 12. As he grew up and developed as a writer, he would incorporate Mississippi Delta people and places into many of his short stories, and later his plays. After over twenty years of writing relentlessly and struggling to make a career of it, and a disastrous professional debut (BATTLE OF ANGELS, 1940), Williams seemingly changed the American Theater overnight with the success of THE GLASS MENAGERIE (1944). In the play, he transposed his mother’s actual stories of gentleman callers in Port Gibson and Columbus, Mississippi to the Mississippi Delta in the character of Amanda Wingfield, named after a family in Mr. Dakin's congregation at St. George's. THE GLASS MENAGERIE was followed by the smash hit A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, in which Blanche and Stella DuBois were also named after members of a prominent Clarksdale family. Williams drew on the Mississippi Delta as a setting for his full length plays SPRING STORM, BATTLE OF ANGELS, SUMMER AND SMOKE, CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, ORPHEUS DESCENDING, THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE, and KINGDOM OF EARTH; the screenplays BABY DOLL and THE LOSS OF A TEARDROP DIAMOND; and many dozens of short plays, short stories, and poems. Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes, for STREETCAR and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF and is the recipient of multiple other awards. He wrote over three dozen full length plays, about 70 published one-act plays, and many published short stories and poems. More Hollywood movies have been made from his plays than any other playwright except Shakespeare. He remains one of the most-produced playwrights of all time, with multiple productions of his plays—especially THE GLASS MENAGERIE, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, and CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF—playing on stages around the world at any particular moment.