Williams, Tennessee
Williams, Tennessee ( Thomas Lanier Williams ) ( 1911 – 83 ),American dramatist, born in Mississippi, the son of a travelling salesman, and brought up there and in St Louis; he studied at Washington, St Louis, and Iowa, and in New York, while embarking on a career as a playwright with American Blues ( 1939 , pub. 1945 ) and Battle of Angels ( 1940 , pub. 1945 ; revised 1957 as Orpheus Descending). He achieved success with the semi-autobiographical The Glass Menagerie ( 1944 , pub. 1945 ), a poignant and painful family drama set in St Louis, in which a frigid and frustrated mother's dreams of her glamorous past as a Southern belle conflict with the grimness of her reduced circumstances, as she persuades her rebellious son Tom to provide a ‘gentleman caller’ for her crippled daughter Laura. His next big success was A Streetcar Named Desire ( 1947 ), a study of sexual frustration,...
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