He won the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice. Between 19, Williams produced more than a play every two years, many of which were extremely successful. He won numerous accolades for the work, which had some basis in Williams’s own life. In 1944, Williams had a massive hit with the play The Glass Menagerie, which made his career. The experience and form did not suit him, and Williams turned to plays fulltime by 1944. Williams was able to make his living writing, including a half-year stint as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1943. This prize led to wider recognition, as well as to a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940. He won the Group Theatre prize in 1939 based on a sampling of his plays. Williams had written plays as early as 1935, some of which were produced locally. He dubbed himself Tennessee Williams in 1939, based on a nickname he acquired at Iowa because of his southern accent. Williams finally finished his degree at the University of Iowa in 1938. Louis’s Washington University before being forced to drop out again. Williams went to work for his father’s employer, the International Shoe Company, and was miserable. He considered becoming a journalist, but was forced to leave school after two years because the Great Depression had limited his funds. By the time he was in high school, Thomas was publishing short stories in national magazines.Īfter graduating from high school in 1929, Williams entered the University of Missouri at Columbia. Though Cornelius Williams was abusive to his family, his son found solace in writing, an interest of his since childhood. Louis when he was hired as the sales manager for a shoe company. That year, Cornelius Williams moved the family to St. The children and their mother lived with her parents in Tennessee until 1918. Williams’s father, a traveling salesman, was rarely home. He was the son of Cornelius Coffin and Edwina (maiden name, Dakin) Williams. ![]() Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. No other writer of the American theater offers the lyricism Mr. ![]() Williams’s best work, but it has its share of his power and magic both in the characters he has created and in the music of his words. Sweet Bird of Youth is not considered on a par with Mr. Writing about a 1975 revival of the play, Edwin Wilson of the Wall Street Journal wrote Critical opinion generally declined over time, though scholars were interested in how the play fit in with the rest of Williams’s career. While some saw it as another example of Williams’s prowess with language and character, others found it disjointed, disorganized, and distasteful. One version was published in Esquire and another, with only two characters (Chance and the Princess), was performed in Miami, Florida, in 1956.įrom the earliest Broadway production of Sweet Bird of Youth, critics disagreed about the play. Williams had written at least eight versions of the play. Touching on familiar themes for Williams (including lost youth and aging, loneliness, sex, and pretending to be what one is not), Sweet Bird of Youth was inspired in part by his own life, though not autobiographical. When the play opened, the frank depictions of various corruptions were considered somewhat shocking. The original production closed January 30, 1960, after 375 performances. Even before it opened on March 10, 1959, at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway, Sweet Bird of Youth had $390,000 in advance sales. ![]() Though Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth (1959) was his biggest box office success since Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), the play came to be regarded as an example of the playwright in decline.
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