Tennessee Williams – 1911-1983

Despite his sobriquet, Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi—not Tennessee—and he made his Broadway breakthrough in 1944 with The Glass Menagerie, a play about social decay, dreams, and disappointment. His next play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), was an even bigger sensation, setting forth the themes that occupied Williams throughout his career: the portrayal of a world of frustrated desire underlying a surface of decayed Southern romance and genteel manners.