Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi. His family life was, what some would call, disastrous. Williams was the second born, of three children. His parents often fought and would engage in violent arguments that frightened his sister Rose. In 1929, Williams saw one of Henrik Ibsen's prod
uctions and soon after decided he would become a playwright himself. After Williams graduated, he moved to New Orleans and changed his name from Thomas Lanier Williams to "Tennessee Williams." In 1944, one of his most well known plays, The Glass Menagerie, has an extremely successful show in Chicago and a year following made its way onto Broadway. It was said that Tennessee used his own family relationships as an inspiration for the play. "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life." Williams struggled with depression throughout most of his life and lived with a fear that he thought he might one day go insane like his sister Rose. During this battle in his life, he struggled with the addiction to prescription drugs and alcohol. In 1983, Tennessee Williams choked to death on a bottle cap in New York City.
Tennessee Williams wrote twenty-five full length plays, produced dozens of short plays and screenplays, two novels, a novella, sixty short stories, over one-hundred poems and an autobiography. Along with several other awards, he won two Pulitzer Prizes and four New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.
Williams Plays: Baby Doll & Tiger Tail, Battle of Angels, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Clothes for a Summer Hotel, Dragon Country: A Book of Plays, Eccentricities of a Nightingale, The Glass Menagerie, The Gnadiges Fraulein, In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel, I Rise in Flame Cried the Phoenix, Kingdom of Earth, A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, The Mutilated, Night of the Iguana, Not About Nightingales, The Notebook of Trigorin, A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot, Period of Adjustment, The Red Devil Battery Sign, The Rose Tatoo, Small Craft Warnings, Something Cloudy, Something Clear, A Streetcar and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre.
Williams is known as a great playwright because of his creative use of literary teniques and his unique style. In particular, Tennessee Williams' use of the literary techniques, imagery, and foreshadowing. His use of these literary techniques give his audience an interesting, exciting and realistic play to follow. However, "Williams is referring to a drama that was more than just a picture of reality: he insists that his ideal theatre make use of all the stage arts to generate a theatrical experience grater than just Realism. From Glass Menagerie on, his plays are very theatrical. His scenic descriptions draw on metaphors from the world of art and painting, and his use of sound and light is symbolic and evocative, not just realistic in its effects. In several of Williams' plays, he consciously exploits non-realistic styles like expressionism, surrealism, and absurdism, which he calls upon playwrights to use in their search for truth. Indeed, Williams's stage directions in the original script of Glass Menagerie called for decidedly plastic elements, including dozens of slide projections, film-like soundtrack music, and dissolving and fading lighting. In order to express his universal truths, Williams created what he termed plastic theater, a distinctive new styler of drama. He insisted that setting, properties, music, sound, and visual effects- all the elements of staging - must combine to reflect and enhance the action, theme, characters, and language.
"http://www.tennesseewilliamsstudies.org/archives/2002/3kramer_print.htm
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