Tennessee Williams Popular Books
Tennessee Williams Biography & Facts
Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter. Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City. It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences. His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Much of Williams's most acclaimed work has been adapted for the cinema. He also wrote short stories, poetry, essays, and a volume of memoirs. In 1979, four years before his death, Williams was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Early life Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Columbus, Mississippi, of English, Welsh, and Huguenot ancestry, the second child of Edwina Dakin (August 9, 1884 – June 1, 1980) and Cornelius Coffin "C. C." Williams (August 21, 1879 – March 27, 1957). His father was a traveling shoe salesman who became an alcoholic and was frequently away from home. His mother, Edwina, was the daughter of Rose O. Dakin, a music teacher, and the Reverend Walter Dakin, an Episcopal priest from Illinois who was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi, shortly after Williams's birth. Williams lived in his grandfather's Episcopalian rectory with his family for much of his early childhood and was close to his grandparents. Among his ancestors was musician and poet Sidney Lanier. He had two siblings, older sister Rose Isabel Williams (1909–1996) and younger brother Walter Dakin Williams (1919–2008). As a young child, Williams nearly died from a case of diphtheria that left him frail and virtually confined to his house during a year of recuperation. At least partly due to his illness, he was considered a weak child by his father. Cornelius Williams, a descendant of East Tennessee pioneers, had a violent temper and was prone to use his fists. He regarded what he thought was his son's effeminacy with disdain. Edwina, locked in an unhappy marriage, focused her attention almost entirely on her frail young son. Critics and historians agree that Williams drew from his own dysfunctional family in much of his writing and that his desire to break free from his puritan upbringing propelled him towards writing. When Williams was eight years old, his father was promoted to a job at the home office of the International Shoe Company in St. Louis. His mother's continual search for a more appropriate home, as well as his father's heavy drinking and loudly turbulent behavior, caused them to move numerous times around St. Louis. Williams attended Soldan High School, a setting he referred to in his play The Glass Menagerie. Later he studied at University City High School. At age 16, Williams won third prize for an essay published in Smart Set, titled "Can a Good Wife Be a Good Sport?" A year later, his short story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" was published (as by "Thomas Lanier Williams") in the August 1928 issue of the magazine Weird Tales. These early publications did not lead to any significant recognition or appreciation of Williams's talent, and he would struggle for more than a decade to establish his writing career. Later, in 1928, Williams first visited Europe with his maternal grandfather Dakin. Education From 1929 to 1931, Williams attended the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes. He was bored by his classes and distracted by unrequited love for a girl. Soon he began entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income. His first submitted play was Beauty Is the Word (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932). As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a writing competition. At University of Missouri, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers. After he failed a military training course in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe Company factory. Although Williams hated the monotony, the job forced him out of the gentility of his upbringing. His dislike of his new 9-to-5 routine drove Williams to write prodigiously. He set a goal of writing one story a week. Williams often worked on weekends and late into the night. His mother recalled his intensity: Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes. Overworked, unhappy, and lacking further success with his writing, by his 24th birthday Williams had suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job. He drew from memories of this period, and a particular factory co-worker, to create the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. By the mid-1930s his mother separated from his father due to his worsening alcoholism and abusive temper. They never divorced. In 1936, Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he wrote the play Me, Vashya (1937). After not winning the school's poetry prize, he decided to drop out. In the autumn of 1937, he transferred to the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he graduated with a B.A. in English in August 1938. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Speaking of his early days as a playwright and an early collaborative play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, Williams wrote, "The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life." Around 1939, he adopted Tennessee Williams as his professional name, in acknowledgement of his Southern accent and roots. Literary influences Williams's writings reference some of the poets and writers he most admired in his early years: Hart Crane, Arthur Rimbaud, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, Clarence Darrow, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, August Strindberg, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Emily Dickinson, William Inge, James Joyce, and, according to some, Ernest Hemingway. Career As Williams was struggling to gain production and an audience for his work in the late 1930s, he worked at a string of menial jobs that includ.... Discover the Tennessee Williams popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Tennessee Williams books.
Best Seller Tennessee Williams Books of 2024
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When Blanche Met Brando
Sam StaggsExhaustively researched and almost flirtatiously opinionated, When Blanche Met Brando is everything a fan needs to know about the groundbreaking New York and London stage productio...
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The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays
Oscar Wilde & Richard CaveLady Windermere's Fan/Salomé/A Woman of No Importance/An Ideal Husband/A Florentine Tragedy/The Importance of Being Earnest'To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to l...
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His Other Life
Melanie McCabeWhen Melanie McCabe’s father died in 1973, she learned a startling truth about his life before he settled into a quiet suburban existence. Terrence McCabe had been married before; ...
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New Ways to Kill Your Mother
Colm TóibínNovelist and critic Colm Tóibín provides “a fascinating exploration of writers and their families” (Entertainment Weekly) and “an excellent guide through the dark terrain of uncons...
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Doctor Faustus
Christopher Marlowe & Alexander DyceDoctor Faustus or, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustusis an Elizabethan tragedy by Christopher Marlowe, based on German stories about the title character F...
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Tennessee Williams
Liliane Kerjan"Moi, je vis comme un bohémien, je suis un fugitif. Il n'y a pas un lieu qui me semble habitable audelà d'une certaine durée, pas même ma propre peau." Petitfils de pasteur, fils ...
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My Sixty Years on the Plains
William T. HamiltonIn these days, when the experience of living right up against nature are fast becoming a thing of the past, the story is of special interest. The mountaineers as a class were uniqu...
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The Past Is Never
Tiffany Quay TysonWINNER of the Willie Morris Award for Southern FictionWINNER of the Mississippi Author Award for Adult Fiction selected by the Mississippi Library Association WINNER of the 2019...
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Ladies of the Rachmaninoff Eyes
Henry Van Dyke & Erik WoodA lost midcentury classicthe farcical misadventures of a queer Black teen sharing a house with two adoptive mothers, a lascivious cook, and a reticent ghost.In a small Michigan tow...
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Tennessee Williams in Provincetown
David KaplanTennessee Williams in Provincetown is the story of Tennessee Williams’s four summer seasons in Provincetown, Massachusetts – 1940, ‘41, ‘44 and ‘47. During that time he wrote plays...
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Eminent Outlaws
Christopher BramThis “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inq...
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Warhol After Warhol
Richard DormentLongtime art critic Richard Dorment reveals the corruption and lies of the art world and its mystifying authentication process.Late one afternoon in the winter of 2003, art critic ...
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Tennessee Williams
Shmoop"Dive deep into the story of Tennessee Williams's life anywhere you go: on a plane, on a mountain, in a canoe, under a tree. Or grab a flashlight and read Shmoop under the covers. ...
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Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee WilliamsThe definitive text of this American classicreissued with an introduction by Edward Albee (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance) and Williams' essay "PersontoPers...
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A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee WilliamsThe Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics Circle Award winning playreissued with an introduction by Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), and Williams' essay "The World ...
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Sweet Bird of Youth
Tennessee WilliamsNow with an insightful new introduction, the author's original Foreword, and the oneact play, The Enemy: Time, on which Sweet Bird of Youth was based. Tennessee Williams knew how t...
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Blanche
Nancy SchoenbergerA penetrating consideration of Tennessee Williams’s most enduring characterBlanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desirewritten by the coauthor of The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters and F...
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Collected Stories
Tennessee WilliamsThis definitive collection establishes Williams as a major American fiction writer of the twentieth century. Tennessee Williams’ Collected Stories combines the four short...
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Shooting Midnight Cowboy
Glenn Frankel"Much more than a pageturner. It’s the first essential work of cultural history of the new decade." Charles Kaiser, The GuardianOne of The Washington Post's 50 best nonfiction book...
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Tennessee Williams
Paul IbellFew writers have brought more of their life into their works than famed playwright Thomas Lanier “Tennessee” Williams III. His characters have often served as proxies for himself, ...
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Kazan on Directing
Elia Kazan & Martin ScorseseElia Kazan was the twentieth century’s most celebrated director of both stage and screen, and this monumental, revelatory book shows us the master at work. Kazan’s list of Br...
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The Collected Poems of Tennessee Williams
Tennessee WilliamsAll of the author's previously published poems, including poems from the plays, are in this definitive edition that comes with a CD of the author reading some of his poems in his u...
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State Tennessee v. Julian Kent Williams
at Knoxville Court of Criminal Appeals of TennesseeThe appellant, Julian Kent Williams, was convicted of custodial interference, 1 a Class A misdemeanor, by a jury of his peers. The trial court sentenced the appellant to pay a fine...
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Follies of God
James GrissomAn extraordinary book; one that almost magically makes clear how Tennessee Williams wrote; how he came to his visions of Amanda Wingfield, his Blanche DuBois, Stella Kowalski, Alma...
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Study Guide to the Major Plays of Tennessee Williams
Intelligent EducationA comprehensive study guide offering indepth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Tennessee Williams, considered to be among the three foremost playwrights of tw...
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Tennessee Williams
Drewey Wayne GunnMore than an updating and expansion of materials, this new edition is so different from the first as to constitute virtually a new book, completely recast so as to bring all inform...
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Pink Triangle
Darwin PorterThe accomplishments of the 20th Century’s mostdiscussed literary superstars entered the canon of theatrical classics during the heyday of Broadway and sexual censorship in Hollywoo...
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Dear Los Angeles
David KipenA rich mosaic of diary entries and letters from Marilyn Monroe, Cesar Chavez, Susan Sontag, Albert Einstein, and many more, this is the story of Los Angeles as told by locals, tran...
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Leading Men
Christopher Castellani"Blazing . . . casts a spell right from the start." Dwight Garner, The New York Times"A timeless and heartbreaking love story." Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere"An ext...
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Tennessee Williams
Robert GrossTennessee Williams' plays are performed around the world, and are staples of the standard American repertory. His famous portrayals of women engage feminist critics, and as Ame...
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Candy Darling
Cynthia CarrA MustRead: The New York Times Book Review, Nylon, Star Tribune, Ms., Kirkus Reviews, The Bay Area Reporter, Town & Country, InsideHook“[A] monumental biography.” Hilton Als, ...