Tennessee Williams

If you go to The Mississippi Writer Page at www.olemiss.edu/mwp you can select from many different writers that either resides or was born in Mississippi. One of the writers featured is Tennessee Williams.

Born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams was the middle child of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina Dakin Williams. Because his father was away from home for long periods of times, due to his job, the Williams's family spent much of the childhood living with their grandfather, who was an Episcopal minister. The Williams family would later move to St. Louis, Missouri in 1918. In his early teen years, Tennessee earn third place for his essay, "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" that was published in Smart Set . With encouragement from his mother, the following year, he published "The Vengeance of Nitocris" in Weird Tales... In 1929 Williams attended the University of Missouri, the place where he was inspired to become a playwright. After a short stay at the University of Missouri, Williams left school to work for the St. Louis shoe company, the same company that his father worked for. Williams later return to college but this time attending the Washington University, but later he enrolled at the University of Iowa where he graduated in 1938. The name Tennessee was given to him in college, because of his southern accent. While attending college, two of WilliamsÐ''s plays, Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind, were produced. Williams's play The Glass Menagerie was the first to appear on Broadway and received excellent reviews from critics. After that several more of Williams's plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, A Rose Tattoo, and Camino Real, found their way to Broadway. Williams received numerous awards including the two Pulitzer Prize for drama for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. Two of his play,