A Street Car Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

New ELA Regents Task I: The Listening Passage

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams, the second child of three, in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1911. Tom, as he was known for most of his life, earned the nickname Tennessee from a college roommate who attributed the name, jokingly to Williams heritage as a Tennessee pioneer.

Tennessee Williams family life was full of tension and despair. His parents often engaged in violent arguments that frightened his older sister, Rose, so much that one evening she went running out of the house. His father, Cornelius, was a stern businessman who managed a shoe warehouse. Cornelius’ bouts with drinking and gambling (habits that later ailed Tennessee) sent rumors about the family throughout the towns in which they lived (Williams moved 16 times in 15 years). His mother, who is often compared to the controlling Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, allowed Rose’s doctor to perform a frontal lobotomy on Rose - an event that greatly disturbed Williams who cared for Rose throughout most of her adult life. However, Tennessee, Rose and his brother Walter remained close to their mother, Edwina, often encouraging her to leave their abusive father.

In 1931, Williams was admitted to the University of Missouri where he saw a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts and decided to become a playwright. His journalism program was interrupted however, when his father forced him to withdraw from college to work at the International Shoe Company. There, he worked with a good friend named Stanley Kowalski who would resurface as a character in Streetcar. Williams reenrolled in college at Washington University only to be dropped in 1937. Finally, in 1938, Williams graduated from the University of Iowa, already having produced several of his plays locally (first by a lively theater group in St. Louis called "The Mummers"). After failing to find work in Chicago, he moved to New Orleans where he changed his name from Tom to Tennessee and launched his career as a writer.Tennessee’s primary sources of inspiration for his works were the writers he grew up with, his family and the South. The work that had the most influence on Williams was that by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Arthur Rimbaud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hart Crane and D.H. Lawrence. His play I Rise in Flame, Cried the Phoenix was written as a tribute to D.H. Lawrence, dramatizing the events surrounding Lawrence's death. In 1945, Tennessee earned his first commercial success with The Glass Menagerie. The play tells the story of Tom, his disabled sister, Laura, and their controlling mother Amanda who tries to make a match between Laura and a gentleman caller.

Many people believe that Tennessee used his own familial relationships as inspiration for the play. Shortly after Menagerie closed, the playwright was already at work on a new piece which contained the image of a young woman who had just been stood up by the man she was planning to marry. He saw her sitting alone in a chair by a window in the moonlight. By 1947, this piece was finished and performed on the stage as A StreetNamed Desire. Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski became household names nearly overnight, and the script continued to make its way into theaters and cinemas worldwide (most recently it was remade for television, starring Jessica Lange and Alec Baldwin). In 1955, after winning the Donaldson Award, the New York Drama Critics Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Streetcar, Tennessee Williams produced another commercial success, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. This play dramatizes the conflicts of a Mississippi family following the diagnosis of their father’s cancer. It also won a Pulitzer Prize and became a popular film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives.

In 1979, Williams returned to Florida, where he had previously spent time in Key West and St. Augustine relaxing and collecting ideas for his work. This time, Williams served as Artist-In-Residence at the Hippodrome State Theatre in Gainesville where audiences saw the world premier of Tiger Tail - his stage adaptation of the film Baby Doll. Williams died tragically in 1983 (he choked to death on the plastic top to his eye medication which he possibly mistook for a sleeping pill). He left behind a series of successful plays and screen adaptations. He was noted for bringing to his audiences a slice of his own life and the feel of southern culture. Elia Kazan said of Tennessee: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."