Tennessee Williams died by choking in a hotel in New York City in 1983. In part because of this, his audience began to drift away near the end of his life. His later work continues the themes of his early plays, and he is sometimes accused of failing to develop further. Williams’s most popular plays were also produced as movies, and he frequently served as screenwriter, sometimes with a collaborator. During the last decade of his life, he received a Kennedy Honors Award and was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame. Williams was the first recipient of the centennial medal from New York’s Episcopal Cathedral of St. He won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award four times, and he won the Pulitizer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire, his other most well-known play, in 1948. This was followed by a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. His plays won many honors, beginning with the Group Theatre Award in 1939. He was not only prolific but also successful. As a young man, he supported himself with various jobs, including waiter, teletype operator, and theater usher.Īfter The Glass Menagerie was produced on Broadway in 1945, however, Williams consistently had his new work produced in various New York theaters, often averaging one play every other year.
He began publishing his work in magazines when he was only twelve years old and decided to become a playwright at the age of twenty, although he also wrote short stories, poems, novels, and memoirs. degree from the University of Iowa in 1938. Louis from 1936 until 1937 before earning his A.B. Williams attended the University of Missouri from 1931 until 1933 and Washington University in St. Williams’s mother, Edwina, was a Southern belle, and his older sister, Rose, to whom Williams was close, suffered from schizophrenia as an adult. Many critics base their interpretation of The Glass Menagerie as autobiographical in part because of the similarities between the Wingfield family and Williams’s own. As an adult, he moved frequently, living in such cities as St. Williams’s family was Episcopalian and his grandfather a minister, although Williams himself converted to Roman Catholicism in 1969. This move to a metropolitan area was difficult for both Williams and his sister, Rose. Louis, Missouri, where Williams’s father, Cornelius, worked as a shoe salesman. His family lived in Mississippi and Tennessee until 1918, when they moved to St. His given name was Thomas Lanier Williams. Tennessee Williams was born in Mississippi in 1911. In this sense, the themes of the play are inseparable from its production values. Tom serves as both narrator and character, dissolving the present into the past Williams signals this by exploiting lighting and sound, especially music-technologies which were less available to earlier playwrights. Through its poetic structure and reliance on stage technology, The Glass Menagerie has had a significant impact on later twentieth century drama. Emerging through this major conflict between Tom and Amanda are the themes of alienation and loneliness, duty and responsibility, and appearances and reality. Like many coming of age stories, the major conflicts in this play are both internal and external Tom cannot choose both the future he desires for himself and the future his mother, Amanda Wingfield, desires for him and for Laura. In some ways, this is a coming of age story, with both Tom Wingfield and Laura Wingfield negotiating their roles as young adults. The Glass Menagerie is autobiographical in its sources. Although The Glass Menagerie also received much popular acclaim, some critics believe that the thematic devices that Williams relies on, such as the legends on the screen, are too heavy-handed. This play was the first of Williams’s to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, an honor he was given four times. The Glass Menagerie was originally produced in Chicago in 1944 and then staged in New York on Broadway in 1945.
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