After recuperating in Memphis, Williams returned to St. Louis and where he connected with several poets studying at Washington University. In , returned to college, enrolling at the University of Iowa. He graduated the following year. When he was 28, Williams moved to New Orleans, where he changed his name he landed on Tennessee because his father hailed from there and revamped his lifestyle, soaking up the city life that would inspire his work, most notably the later play, A Streetcar Named Desire.
More importantly, it landed him an agent, Audrey Wood, who would become his friend and adviser. In Williams' play, Battle of Angels , debuted in Boston. It quickly flopped, but the hardworking Williams revised it and brought it back as Orpheus Descending , which later was made into the movie, The Fugitive Kind , starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani.
Other work followed, including a gig writing scripts for MGM. But Williams' mind was never far from the stage. On March 31, , a play he'd been working for some years, The Glass Menagerie , opened on Broadway. Critics and audiences alike lauded the play, about a declassed Southern family living in a tenement, forever changing Williams' life and fortunes.
Two years later, A Streetcar Named Desire opened, surpassing his previous success and cementing his status as one of the country's best playwrights. Society Resources The following is a selected list of books, articles, and manuscripts about Tennessee Williams in the research centers of The State Historical Society of Missouri. March 6, Louis Post-Dispatch. July , Louis Globe-Democrat.
February , Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine. February 27, April , February 25, Louis Riverfront Times. Books and Articles Hale, Allean. Hale, Allean. Leavitt, Richard F. In the s, when he was struggling to make his career as a writer, he worked different menial jobs to earn money to fulfill his basic needs.
He also worked at Hollywood as a scriptwriter. In the winter of , his work The Glass Menagerie was featured, and it won him popular acclaim. After this work, he gave several successful works, but depression and heavy drinking aided in failing his health. Then he explored homosexual relationships, and this continued till his death. He came in a relationship with a Vietnam war veteran, Robert Carroll, and he was one of the two people who were mentioned as heirs in his will.
His works often deal with the human confinement that is a sentence which we bear till death. He tries to communicate, live, and love. This is often expressed in his works in the form of sex. Some critics refer to this expression as a form of obsession. Through his characters, he has shown the ambiguity of human relationships.
Social commentary is an essential part of his portraiture though he is not a propagandist. This work portrays the lost culture of the South. His works also depict the scars that are inflicted by years on individuals. His work has traces of romanticism. His skill lies in the use of the southern language, which is evident in the flowery, bombastic, and eloquent traits of his works. His characters bear the stamp of their place of origin. The language of these characters is graphic, colorful, and humorous.
These characters melodramatize and poeticize the situations in which they are. They try to protect themselves in the illusionary world which they have created. There are different characters who repeatedly assert that they are not mad, but still, they show mild symptoms of psychological problems.
Blanche is an example of it, of whom it is not certain that what parts of her speech are lies. There is no surety whether she is all right or suffering from delusion. There are contradictory assertions from her, and these suggest that these are symptoms of her emotional disintegration. She makes statements that are in conflict with one another. The reason behind her psychological problems is her past, and she tries to get rid of the problems by denial of her past, trying to change it.
They face a predicament, and they try to replace one story over another. Though this pattern changed in Suddenly Last Summer. In this play, the confinement and sanity are dependent on the central story that is central to the play. Through a character, Catherine, the problem of language and madness is expressed. She tells her sister that it is impossible for her to stop talking and especially when she is nervous.
These plays also give the possibility of a new gender role system through the two leading female protagonists in each play. Because his father was a traveling salesman and was often away from home, he lived the first ten years of his life in his maternal grandparents' home.
His father was a loud, outgoing, hard-drinking, boisterous man who bordered on the vulgar, at least as far as the young, sensitive Tennessee Williams was concerned. In contrast to his father, his mother seemed to be rather quiet and possessive, demonstrating a tremendous attachment to her children. Tennessee was himself a rather delicate child who was plagued with several serious childhood diseases which kept him from attending regular school.
Instead, he read profusely in his grandfather's library. His maternal grandfather was an Episcopal rector, apparently a rather liberal and progressive individual. Even though there are several portraits of the clergy in Williams' later works, none seemed to be built on the personality of his real grandfather.
Perhaps because his early life was spent in an atmosphere of genteel culture, the greatest shock to Williams was the move his family made when he was about twelve. The father accepted a position in a shoe factory in St. Louis and moved the family from the expansive Episcopal home in the South to an ugly tenement building in St.
Their cramped apartment and the ugliness of the city life seemed to make a lasting impression on the boy. Here in school he was often ridiculed for his southern accent, and he was never able to find acceptance. Likewise, his father, who had been a traveling salesman, was suddenly at home most of the time.
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