Tennessee williams biography sparknotes brave new world
Tennessee Williams
Williams was always confronting the future; a shaman with a typewriter, he dug into the darkest depths of the American psyche in search of dramatic truths.
— Randy Gener, American Theater Magazine
Arguably America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi on March 26, The son of a salesman and a Southern belle, Williams spent his much of his early childhood in the parsonage of his beloved grandfather, an Episcopal priest, but moved with his family to St. Louis, where he attended high school and began to write. Forced by his father to leave the University of Missouri and take a 9-to-5 job in a shoe factory, Williams became more and more determined to be a successful writer. He took classes at Washington University in St. Louis, and wrote his first plays. In he earned a degree from the University of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm. Of the theater he remarked: “know it’s the only thing that saved my life.” By , he had adopted the name of Tennessee Williams, written Battle of Angels (for which he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant) and found his loyal and intrepid agent Audrey Wood. His first great success came in with his “memory play,” The Glass Menagerie, which opened in Chicago to rave reviews and moved to Broadway, where it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play of the year. A Streetcar Named Desire, his next play, was a huge success in and established Williams as the premiere American playwright of his generation. Between and , he enjoyed a string of Broadway successes, including Summer and Smoke (), The Rose Tattoo (), Camino Real (), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (), Orpheus Descending () and Sweet Bird of Youth (). By he had won two Pulitzer Prizes, three New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, and a Tony Award. Movies were made of many of his plays and brought him huge success, renown and wealth. He continued to write voraciously, every day, pro Editor’s Note: The following panel was transcribed directly from tapes made at the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. Dr. Will Brantley: I thought I would start by reading a citation that Lillian Hellman was invited to present to Tennessee Williams in It was the Gold Medal for Drama, awarded by the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She had mentioned Williams a number of times before that, with The Autumn Garden, for instance, when some of the critics noted that it seemed to be a more Williams-esque play than what she had produced up to that point, and she even said we’re somewhere on top of The Rose Tattoo and Tennessee Williams in this play. She admired him a great deal and made a number of public comments to that effect, although in the early sixties she felt that he was not doing his best work and said as much. In the Paris Review interview, for instance, in , she said, “I think he is a natural playwright. He writes by sanded fingertips. I don’t always like his plays. The last three or four seem to me to have gone off, kind of way out in a conventional way. He is throwing his talent around.” She frequently acknowledged, however, that he was one of the great American playwrights, and in , as I mentioned, she was invited to present him with this award, and here’s what she said: The American Theatre is, indeed, a strange and difficult world. It will often reward its practitioners with a generosity that approaches hysteria; it is then that the critical heart is not only a loving heart, but its space in the breast reserved for the rest of us becomes too small and the heart moves upward to find room in the head. But, evidently, the head is To “Grand” All life, all beauty results from being broken down For you are not stars, sky-set in the shape of a lyre, According to the teachings of methodology in social sciences, the acquisition of one kind of knowledge springs from the dialectical relationship between new information (stimulus) and the total of already existing knowledge; the incorporation, that is, of new knowledge results from the intellectual clash of the new with the old. The comparative method is for social sciences (and particularly for law and literature) exactly what the empirical method is for natural sciences&#;that is, a scientific process for the discovery of new knowledge or the verification of that already existing. The comparative knowledge of similarities and differences between two subject-matters is wider than the mere gathering of isolated items of knowledge about them (Owen Aldridge 1). The comparative approach to Tennessee Williams and Jean Cocteau aims exactly at not only this “new knowledge” of their works but also at delineating the psychography of these two significant twentieth century writers together with the discovery of the intellectual affinity of the two men. ¶2 For the choice of the comparative method to be justifiable and not arbitrary, the two writers should lend themselves to such a comparison. Thus, there should exist between them a common third factor (tertium comparationis) constituting the bridge of communication and the standpoint from which the comparison will start. For this first comparative study of Williams and Cocteau we have selected as a departure point the myth of Orpheus, because both writers were only as a concrete rostrum from which the wider fa SPRING Tennessee Williams. pages. $ Nothing gets a theatregoer&#;s blood rushing like a new play by Tennessee Williams. That Poor Tom has been dead for more than fifteen years hasn&#;t dampened the enthusiasm: two years ago, the Texas birthing (with Vanessa Redgrave&#;s indispensable midwifery) of Not About Nightingales opened to international acclaim at Houston&#;s Alley Theatre, moving to London, New York, and a Tony like so much posthumous clockwork. Nightingales has been followed (out of the Williams archive at U.T.-Austin&#;s Humanities Research Center) by a slightly earlier script, Spring Storm, which in November received its world premiere in Austin: the opening production of a spanking new company, the Actors Repertory of Texas. A slightly different and longer version, nicely edited by Dan Isaac, is now available from New Directions, sustaining a boomlet in the reputation of the stage&#;s Spirit of St. Louis. After the long shadow of critical disdain that dogged his later years, Tennessee would certainly have reason to be proud. Whether he would have welcomed the inevitable poring over his juvenilia is another matter; despite its many charms, Storm is no Nightingales, which is no Sweet Bird of youth. One suspects that if ever prevailed upon to stage his collected papers, at a minimum Williams would have insisted upon extensive rewrites, followed by tryouts out of town. (And deny as it might, Austin is still very much out of town, although each year makes more credible the claim of a live theatre scene in the capital.) But even lesser Williams is very interesting drama indeed, and an audience can find in these early plays much that is characteristic of his major work: a sweeping romantic canvas; brave hearts, high feelings, emotional risks; a driving energy of thrumming eroticism, stymied and twisted by social constrictions; grand and unembarrassed rhetorical flourishes; and above all, outsized and memorable characters, seemingly larger than life but Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference Panel:
Williams and His Contemporaries: Lillian Hellman
© Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival
Moderator: Will Brantley
Panelists: Deborah Martinson, R. Barton Palmer, Nancy M. TischlerOrpheus Introspecting: Tennessee Williams and Jean Cocteau
Jean Kontaxopoulos
— Jean Cocteau, “Letter to Mary Hoeck” ()
but the dust of those who have been dismembered by Furies!
—Tennessee Williams, In the Winter of Cities (28)