Kelso High School English Department

A Streetcar named Desire

Tennessee Williams

Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi The nickname “Tennessee” was given to him at college by a fellow student who confused Mississippi where he was born with another Southern state - Tennessee

Tennessee Williams The young Thomas was badly affected by the marriage difficulties suffered by his mother and father and as a child found consolation in reading and in later life writing He was bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness and grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing In 1929 he became a student at the University of Missouri and began to make a name for himself as a writer

Tennessee Williams The Depression put an end to his studies and in 1931 he became a clerk in a shoe firm He was miserable and suffered a nervous breakdown After the Depression when his family’s finances improved he became a student at Washington University in St Louis. There he wrote a number of plays performed by amateur companies

Tennessee Williams During this time his sister Rose became mentally unstable accusing her father of attacking her The sexual content of her fantasies spelt scandal and so alarmed her mother that she agreed to a pre-frontal lobotomy to be performed on Rose in 1937

Tennessee Williams Tennessee was away at university during this time and never forgave himself for not having been there to prevent the operation He was never to forgive his mother for her part in the operation There is much of Rose in the characterisation of Blanche

Tennessee Williams There then followed a period of drifting for Williams which took him to New Orleans – the setting for Streetcar During his time in New Orleans he became a practising homosexual He continued to write and began to win prizes for his work

Tennessee Williams During 1942 – 1947 he wrote two of his most famous plays – The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar named Desire Streetcar opened to great acclaim in Williams was by now a wealthy man, having sold the screen rights for both the plays and deriving a good income from the stage productions as well

Tennessee Williams However, success did not bring happiness. He underwent psychotherapy for depression; his drug taking and drinking increased and his constant search for sexual encounters caused many problems to his live-in partner, Frank Merlo

Tennessee Williams As a result his writing deteriorated. Though he wrote several plays between 1962 and his death, none were really successful He was committed to a mental hospital by his brother, but after his release he was so befuddled by drugs and alcohol that he appeared indifferent to his failures

Tennessee Williams He died in New York on the 24 th February 1983 in a hotel named Elysee - an ironically appropriate name that recalls Elysian Fields in Streetcar His death was caused by choking to death on a medicine cap bottle in a alcohol related incident one month short of his seventy- second birthday

Tennessee Williams In his long career he wrote:- twenty-five full length plays five screenplays over seventy one-act plays hundreds of short stories two novels poetry memoir