TENNESSEE WILLIAMS AND THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA
TIMELINE
This timeline shows Williams’ Mississippi Delta dates and the Broadway premieres of his Mississippi Delta plays.
Williams also set dozens of short plays, poems, and stories in the Delta. Go here for a complete list of his published works.
1917 | The Reverend Walter E. Dakin preaches his first sermon at St. Georges Episcopal Church in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His family would follow him there later that year: his wife Rosina, his daughter Edwina, and his grandchildren: 8 year old Rose, and 6 year old Tom (later Tennessee) Williams.
1917-1918 | After enrolling in first grade at the Eliza Clark School, Tom has an almost-fatal attack of diphtheria, which would weaken him for some time.
1918 | Cornelius Williams, Edwina’s husband and the children’s father, worked as a traveling salesman, and was on the road for the first 7 years of Tom’s life. In 1918, Cornelius is promoted to a managerial position at the International Shoe Company in St. Louis. Tom and Edwina move there with him, and Rose stays behind to live with the Dakins in Clarksdale for over a year.
1919 | St. George’s purchases the house next to the church, at 106 Sharkey Avenue, as a new rectory. Previously, the Dakins and Rose had been living in a house on De Soto Avenue in Clarksdale. This building now houses the Tennessee Williams Rectory Museum. In St. Louis, Tom and Rose’s younger brother Dakin is born.
1920 | Tom comes to live with the Dakins in the rectory for 16 months. He completes 4th grade at Oakhurst school. His friends in the neighborhood include Eddie Peacock and Phil Clark.
1921 | A few months after Mr. Dakin performs the wedding of Blanche Cutrer to Ed Smith at Belvoir, a.k.a. the Cutrer Mansion, Tom returns to St. Louis.
1922-28 | According to his brother Dakin, and to Clarksdale residents, Tom visits the Dakins in Clarksdale most summers as he grows up. He gets to know the Perry family in Tunica, Mississippi, where Mr. Dakin is also the rector.
1923-24 | Tom is given a typewriter by his mother, and, encouraged by a teacher, begins to write.
1928 | The summer before his senior year of high school, Tom accompanies Mr. Dakin and a group of Episcopal ladies from Mississippi on a two-month tour of Europe. Before sailing to Europe, Tom and Mr. Dakin stay in New York, where he takes in his first Broadway plays. On the newsstand is a magazine called Weird Tales, which contains Tom’s first published story, The Vengance of Nitocris.
1932 | The Dakins retire to Memphis. Their St. George’s parishioners wanted them to stay in Clarksdale for their retirement, however the Depression affected their ability to rent their Memphis investment property, so they moved into it.
1932 | After Tom flunks ROTC, his father Cornelius pulls him from the University of Missouri, to work at the International Shoe Company, where Cornelius is a sales manager. For three years, Williams worked all day and wrote into the night. His experiences and emotions from this time would appear in The Glass Menagerie
1935 | Following a nervous breakdown, Tom recuperates at his grandparents’ house in Memphis in the spring and summer of 1935. His first play, Cairo! Shanghai! Bombay!, was performed by a local Memphis theater group. He wrote: “There and then the theatre and I found each other for better or worse. I know it’s the only thing that saved my life.”
1937 | Tom writes his first full length play set in the Mississippi Delta, Spring Storm, while at the University of Iowa, finishing his degree. It was dismissed by his professor after a reading in class. After the rejection, Williams wrote in his journal, “There is still a chance they may be wrong—all of them—I have to cling to that chance....” Spring Storm’s first professional production was in 1995.
1940 | Tom, now Tennessee, has his second full length Delta play, Battle of Angels produced by the Theatre Guild, with the intent to take it to Broadway. Williams brought director Margaret Webster to Clarksdale on a whirlwind 48 hour trip to help her prepare. The play fails in its Boston run and does not go to New York. Williams would rewrite the play for the next 17 years.
1944-45 | The Glass Menagerie premieres in Chicago and then moves to Broadway, running for 16 months and beginning Williams’ career as one of the most successful playwrights in the world. When the play premiered, he had been writing for 20 years. Williams used his mother Edwina’s stories of her gentleman callers as a young woman in Port Gibson and Columbus, Mississippi, but transposed them to the Mississippi Delta, giving her beaux local names.
1944-53 | After Mrs. Dakin’s death in 1944 (she never got to see her grandson’s great success), Mr. Dakin would visit Clarksdale each spring, staying at the Alcazar hotel and with friends, for about a month, until a couple of years before his death. He lived to be 98.
1947 | A Streetcar Named Desire opens on Broadway. It is a smash hit, introducing the world to Marlon Brando, and wins the Pulitzer Prize. In Streetcar, Blanche and Stella DuBois are from the Mississippi Delta. Though he used the name of the town of Laurel, Mississippi in the play (and Blue Mountain, Glorious Hill, and other real and fictional names in other Delta plays), local landmarks like Moon Lake identify the area as the Mississippi Delta.
1948 | Summer and Smoke opens on Broadway. Williams set this play in the actual rectory he lived in with his grandparents, and featured many Clarksdale landmarks in the play, such as Moon Lake, the Episcopal Church, the town square, and the train depot.
EARLY 1950’S | Sometimes accompanying Mr. Dakin, Williams and director Elia Kazan make visits to Clarksdale and the Delta to research possible projects. Kazan brings Barbara Bel Geddes to Clarksdale to prepare for her role Maggie the Cat in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
1955 | Set in the Mississippi Delta on “28,000 acres of the richest land this side of the valley Nile,” Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opens on Broadway. It wins the Pulitzer Prize. Cat is based in part on a Mississippi Delta family that Williams grew up knowing, the Perrys, who were family friends and parishioners of Mr. Dakin. Other Delta-area references are featured in the play, including the athletic field where Brick breaks his ankle; Moon Lake; the Clarksdale Register; shopping in Memphis; and the Episcopal Church.
1956 | Baby Doll films in Benoit, Mississippi, directed by Elia Kazan. Williams would come to the set for a few days before filming started, to work on the script. It would be his last visit ever to the Mississippi Delta
1957 | Orpheus Descending. Williams’ rewrite of his 1940 play Battle of Angels, set in Clarksdale, opens on Broadway.
1968 | The Seven Descents of Myrtle (a.k.a. Kingdom of Earth), set in the Mississippi Delta, opens on Broadway.