The Oxford Companion to English Literature | 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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