Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is one of Tennessee Williams’ most performed plays and won both a Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Below is a short biography for Tennessee Williams from our program for our production of The Glass Menagerie.

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Colombus, Mississippi in 1911. He grew up with his parents and older sister Rose, in the house owned by his grandfather who was an Episcopal (Anglican) clergyman. In 1918, the family moved to St Louis and Tennessee’s younger brother Dakin was born. He became interested in writing at an early age and devoted most of his free time to it. He entered college during the Great Depression and it was there that his fraternity brothers gave him the name Tennessee because of his rich southern drawl. He left college after a couple of years to take up clerical work at the shoe company his father worked for and it was during this time that local theatre groups began producing his work. In 1937 he left St Louis to complete his studies in dramatic writing at the University of Iowa while working a variety of part time jobs. He was very close to his sister Rose who had a history of mental illness and had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. While Williams was in Iowa that year, a prefrontal lobotomy was performed on Rose with her parents consent. This left her unable to communicate for the rest of her life and the event greatly influenced Williams work.

In Boston, 1940, Battle of Angels became his first professionally staged work but it closed after poor reviews and a censorship controversy. It was in 1945 that he achieved great success with The Glass Menagerie which was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best play. He was awarded this prize on three more occasions for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Night of the Iguana (1962). Other plays include The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), Period of Adjustment (1960), The Eccentricities of a Nightingale (1964) as well as other plays, prose and poetry. In 1957 he rewrote Battle of Angels as Orpheus Descending which received wide spread critical success.

His plays have been performed consistently all over the world for the past 50 years and have been transformed into films on numerous occasions with varying success. Most notable of these is A Streetcar Named Desire starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh (1951). Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama on two occasions for A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He died in 1983 at the age of 72.