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 | | | Photograph: Tennessee Williams, from a 1948 issue of Life Magazine. |
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| 12/3/1947 |
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Tennessee Williams and Desire
When 28 year-old Tom Williams finally left the "monolithic puritanism" of his parents' Missouri home, he headed for New Orleans, for a new life as a writer, a newly-realized sexual identity as a homosexual, even a new first name: Tennessee. He lived and wrote among the artists and prostitutes and working poor of the French Quarter, in a neighborhood where the streetcars had names.... |
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| 12/3/1947 |
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Tennessee Williams and Desire
On this day in 1947, Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway. The play ran for two years, and brought Williams the first of his two Pulitzers. It also launched the career of twenty-three-year-old Marlon Brando -- "an impossible, psychopathic bastard," said co-star Jessica Tandy, but watching his performance, said another actor, was "like being in the eye of the hurricane." |
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A Streetcar Named Desire
drama |
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
drama |
Memoirs
memoirs |
Selected Letters of Tennessee Williams, Volume I: 1920-1945
letters |
The Glass Menagerie
drama |
Twenty Seven Wagons Full of Cotton
drama |
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FIND BOOKS BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
AT
Powell's Books
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A Streetcar Named Desire: The Playwright (Hippodrome State Theatre)
A useful resource for younger students which features a concise biography, and information about characters and setting, poetic references, and topics for classroom discussion. |  | Fifty Years of "Desire"
1997 transcript from PBS NewsHour which offers a synopsis and commentary on A Streetcar Named Desire, and a discussion about the enduring nature of the play and the playwright:
"... it was one of the first times I think in the American theater, that working class figures were put on the stage within a very strong psychological context, but so much of the time through the 30's where the working class of this culture began to appear on the American stage it was much more on the social context; it was much more in Clifford O'Dette's plays, for examples, and I think the figure of Stanley, the figure of Mitch also actually -- Steve, Eunice, all of these figures, from this working class culture in New Orleans -- I think it was surprising to the American public to see these figures so respected by the writer." | | Tennessee Williams - Essays
Offers the following articles and literary analysis of the playwright's life and works:
"A Brief Biography of Tennessee Williams"
"'Certain Moral Values': A Rhetoric of Outcasts in the Plays of Tennessee Williams"
"Influences of Crane and Rilke in Williams's The Glass Menagerie" | | The Mississippi Writer's Page (Ole Miss)
Offers a biography, a bibliography of works by and about the writer (including recent literary criticism and analysis), links, and Williams-related news.
"One of America's greatest playwrights, and certainly the greatest ever from the South, Tennessee Williams wrote fiction and motion picture screenplays, but he is acclaimed primarily for his plays — nearly all of which are set in the South, but which at their best rise above regionalism to approach universal themes." | |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
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, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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