Cat on a Hot Tin Roof | Author Biography

Tennessee Williams (born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911) was the second child of a genteel southern belle and a traveling salesman who came from a long line of frontiersmen and glib politicians. Sickly and weakened by a life-threatening bout with diphtheria, the quiet child preferred books to sports, earning him the scornful nickname "Miss Nancy" from his robust father. Williams spent his early childhood in Tennessee in the rectory of his maternal grandfather, an Episcopal minister, mostly in the company of his older sister Rose and his domineering mother, Edwina. The conflict between his puritan maternal family and the cavalier sensuality of his father's side of the family warred within him for the rest of his life. This duality fueled his art with tension and plagued his life with bouts of mental breakdowns, addictions, and depression.

Tennessee Williams
Tennessee Williams

Williams's art reflected the emotional currents of his life: guilt over the deterioration of his schizophrenic sister Rose (who underwent one of the first prefrontal lobotomies to be performed in the United States), the masking of his own homosexuality (which he did not reveal publicly until 1970), and his addictions to alcohol and sleeping pills. In his plays, themes of cannibalism, rape, mutilation, sexual frustration, and twisted love disrupt the complacent southern decorum his troubled characters struggle to maintain.

Williams published his first short story at age seventeen and established himself as a cornerstone of Southern Gothic drama in his early thirties with The Glass Menagerie (1944), a nearly autobiographical version of Rose's stunted social comiing out. For the next forty years he would produce a new play every two years, with his most acclaimed works appearing in the early half of this period. A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) both won Pulitzer Prizes. In his heyday. Williams was the enfant terrible of contemporary theater; a gifted provocateur who delighted in shocking and titillating his audiences. Ill-health compounded by his addictions led to a complete mental and physical collapse in 1969, and his work, ever more lascivious, never recovered the vitality of his early plays. He died in 1983, eight years after the publication of his Memoirs, in which he revealed the intimate and sometimes sordid details of his tortured personal life.