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[7282] Dorothea Lange, Antebellum Plantation House in Greene County, Georgia (1937), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-017941-C DLC].
Williams was forever marked by the alienation and psychological pain of his childhood. After he flunked ROTC, his father forced him to drop out of the University of Missouri and got him a job in his shoe company’s warehouse. Williams wrote furiously by night, but after three years the pressure of the factory work resulted in his first nervous breakdown, in 1935. Not long afterward, his beloved but reclusive sister, Rose, suffered a mental breakdown so devastating that their mother signed the papers to give her a prefrontal lobotomy. Williams changed his name to “Tennessee” while living in New Orleans, where he continued to write. During this period he also continued to explore his sexual attraction to men, which he’d discovered while finishing his undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa. Recognizing his homosexuality deepened a belief Williams had formed while watching his sister’s slow decline–that the pressure to conform to the American mainstream could be a powerful and dangerous force. After producing several plays in local theaters, Williams enjoyed his first big success with The Glass Menagerie (1945) and followed it up with such powerful plays as the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Other plays include The Rose Tattoo (1950), Camino Real (1953), and The Night of the Iguana(1961).
Although he continued writing throughout his life, by the early 1960s, Williams had already produced his greatest work. The death of his longtime companion, Frank Merlo, in 1963, as well as Williams’s continued abuse of alcohol and sleeping pills, forced Williams into a decline from which he never fully recovered. Williams wrote several more plays in the 1970s, including Out Cry (1971) and Small Craft Warnings (1972). He died after choking on the cap of a medicine bottle in a New York hotel room.
[5170] Marion Post Walcott, Saturday Afternoon, Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi (1939),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF33-030640-M3 DLC].
Urban scene with African American men, cars, and store-fronts. Blanche Cutrer, who was used by Tennessee Williams as a model for Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, lived in Clarksdale.
[5368] Carl Van Vechten, Portrait of Marlon Brando, in A Streetcar Named Desire (1948),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-116613].
Tennessee Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Marlon Brando starred as the sexual and brutal Stanley Kowalski in the Broadway version and in the censored 1951 movie co-starring Vivien Leigh.
[7282] Dorothea Lange, Antebellum Plantation House in Greene County, Georgia (1937),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-017941-C DLC].
Neoclassical pillars and porch of large plantation house. The “plantation myth” exemplifies ideas about the Old South’s benevolent, paternalistic institutions and traditions.
[7497] Walter Albertin, Tennessee Williams, Full-length Portrait, Walking, at Service for Dylan Thomas, Facing Front (1953),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-115075].
Known to incorporate themes of alienation and pain in his work, Williams wrote a number of well-known plays, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.