Artist

Tennessee Williams (Playwright) was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. Williams’ first published story, “Isolated,” appeared in the junior-high-school newspaper in 1924. While working at his father’s shoe company, he wrote the short story “Stella for Star,” for which he won first prize in the St. Louis Writers’ Guild Contest. In 1944, The Glass Menagerie opened in Chicago, and premiered in New York the following spring. A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Marlon Brando, Jessica Tandy and Kim Hunter, opened in New York on December 3, 1947; it won the Pulitzer Prize and ran for two years. In 1951, The Rose Tattoo won the Tony Award for Best Play. In 1953, after the New York opening of Camino Real was poorly received, he moved to Key West, and began to write Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which opened on Broadway on March 24, 1955. It, too, won the Pulitzer. His other plays include Sweet Bird of Youth, Suddenly Last Summer, The Night of the Iguana, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, Slapstick Tragedy, Kingdom of Earth and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel. Tennessee Williams died on February 24, 1983. He was seventy-one.