- Born
- 26 March 1911Columbus, Mississippi, USA
- Died
- 25 February 1983New York City, USA · aged 71
Tennessee Williams
The author of “A Streetcar Named Desire” wrote about desire and loneliness – and lived for fourteen years with Frank Merlo.
Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams, grew up in Mississippi and St. Louis with a domineering father, a genteel mother and his beloved sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and lobotomised in 1943. She inspired many of his fragile heroines.
His breakthrough came in 1944 with “The Glass Menagerie”. “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” (1955) each won the Pulitzer Prize. His plays, many of them set in the South, tell of desire, loneliness, decay and of people who do not fit in. In “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, Brick’s love for his dead friend Skipper hints at a homosexual desire that could not be spoken on the stage of the time.
Williams was gay. From 1947 to 1963 he lived with Frank Merlo, a former Navy sailor, who managed his household. Merlo’s death from cancer in 1963 plunged Williams into a deep depression, with alcohol and drugs. In his “Memoirs” (1975) he wrote openly about his homosexuality.
His later plays were less successful. He died in a New York hotel in 1983, aged 71. He is regarded as one of the greatest American playwrights.