Born in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911, Thomas Lanier Williams was known for most of his life as 'Tom' but earned the nickname of Tennessee in college. The nickname stuck after a college roommate made a humorous reference to Williams' heritage as a Tennessee pioneer.
Much has been written about Williams' turbulent adolescence, his troubled parents' marriage, and his invalid sister Rose, and it no doubt had a great influence on his art. His father, Cornelius, had frequent bouts with alcoholism and gambling. His mother, Edwina (allegedly the model for Amanda in The Glass Menagerie), was a controlling figure who allowed the family doctor to perform a frontal lobotomy on her emotionally disturbed daughter, Rose. (This disturbing event would later form the basis for Suddenly, Last Summer.)
Williams later developed an interest in drama at the University of Missouri but his college education was cut short when his father, in dire financial straits, forced him to drop out and go to work at the International Shoe Company. It was there that Williams became good friends with a co-worker named Stanley Kowalski, whose name would later figure prominently in the play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
Eventually, Williams obtained his college degree (from the University of Iowa) and after a brief stint in Chicago, moved to New Orleans where he began his career as a playwright. Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and D.H. Lawrence were some of the writers who had a profound effect on Williams' work and in 1945, he scored his first commercial success with The Glass Menagerie.
After The Glass Menagerie, Williams began writing his next work based on an image he had of a woman sitting alone in a chair by a window, bathed in moonlight. She had been jilted on the eve of her wedding. This image became the inspiration for Blanche DuBois, the central character of his new play, A Streetcar Named Desire which he finished in 1947. Williams not only used New Orleans as the setting for the drama but he also took the title from the famous 'Crescent City' street railway Desire. The Desire line was started by the New Orleans Railway and Light Co. in 1920 and the original route ran down such streets as Bourbon, Esplanade, and Elysian Fields which is the location of the Kowalski's apartment.
by Jeff Stafford
