Louis neighborhood, similar to the neighborhood in which Williams grew up. Williams’ autobiographical play is set during the Depression in a lower-middle class St. Tennessee Williams died of complications from drug and alcohol abuse on February 25, 1983. He remains one of America’s most popular and frequently produced playwrights. Over the course of his long career, this 1979 Kennedy Center Honoree won nearly every major theater award for drama including the Pulitzer Prize-and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980. Williams once said that “success and failure are equally disastrous.” Sadly, he never enjoyed his fame and wealth. He turned to alcohol and drugs to dull his pain-even after he had become a successful playwright.

Throughout his life, Williams struggled to fit in and find some kind of emotional peace. Then at 28, he decided to move to New Orleans and essentially reinvent himself, changing his first name from Thomas to Tennessee. Basing his characters on his life and the lives of his family, the “outsider” Williams turned his sense of isolation and pain into crushing words. A southerner by birth, he naturally set most of his plays in the American South. Rose was never the same after the procedure.Īs Williams got older, he studied poetry, worked odd jobs, attended several different colleges, and wrote plays-several of which were produced at the University of Iowa.

His parents’ marriage was rocky, and Rose-suffering from schizophrenia-eventually underwent a lobotomy, an invasive brain operation that was thought to be a cure at the time. It was difficult for him to adjust to the city and he began to write because, he said, “I found life unsatisfactory.” In truth, life was hard for the entire family.

Louis, Missouri, Williams felt like an outcast in school and suffered from bouts of depression. Only 16 months apart, Williams bonded strongly with the shy, reclusive Rose. His father traveled frequently for a shoe company, leaving Williams, his older sister Rose, and his younger brother Dakin, to be raised by their overprotective mother, Edwina. Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi.

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