In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri. After two years he dropped out of school, compelled to do so by his father, and took a job in the warehouse of the same shoe company for which his father worked. He was an employee there for ten months, despising the job but working at the warehouse throughout the day and writing late into the night. The strain was too much, and Williams had a nervous breakdown. He recovered at the home of his grandparents, and during these years he continued to write. Amateur productions of his early plays were put on in Memphis and St. Louis. During this time, Rose¹s mental health continued to deteriorate. During a fight between Cornelius and Edwina, Cornelius made a move towards Rose that he claimed was meant to calm her. Rose thought his overtures were sexual and suffered a terrible breakdown. Her parents had her lobotomised shortly afterward.
Williams went back to school and graduated from the University of Iowa in 1938. He then moved to New Orleans, where he changed his name to Tennessee. Having struggled with his sexuality all through his youth, he now fully entered gay life, with a new name, a new home, and promising talent. That same year, he won a prize for American Blues, a collection of one-act plays. In 1940, Battle of Angels (later rewritten as Orpheus Descending), his first full-length and professionally produced play, failed miserably. Tennessee Williams continued to struggle. 1944-1945 brought a great turning point in his life and career: The Glass Menagerie was produced in Chicago to great success, and shortly afterward was a smash hit on Broadway. While success freed Williams financially, it also made it difficult for him to write. He went to Mexico to work on a play originally titled The Poker Night. This play eventually became one of his masterpieces, A Streetcar Named Desire. It won Williams a Pulitzer Prize in 1947, which enabled him to travel and buy a home in Key West, a new base to which Williams could escape for both relaxation and writing. Around this time, Williams met Frank Merlo. The two fell in love, and the young man became Williams¹ romantic partner until Merlo¹s untimely death in 1961. He was a steadying influence on Williams, who suffered from depression and lived in fear that he, like his sister Rose, would go insane.
These years were some of Williams¹ most productive. His plays were a great success in the United States and abroad, and he was able to write works that were well-received by critics and popular with audiences: The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Night of the Iguana (1961), among many others. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won Williams his second Pulitzer Prize.
He gave American theatregoers unforgettable characters, an incredible vision of life in the South, and a series of powerful portraits of the human condition. He was deeply interested in something he called "poetic realism," the use of everyday objects, which, seen repeatedly and in the right contexts, become imbued with symbolic meaning. His plays, for their time, also seemed preoccupied with the extremes of human brutality and sexual behaviour: madness, rape, incest, nymphomania, as well as violent and fantastic deaths. Williams himself often commented on the violence in his own work, which to him seemed part of the human condition; he was conscious, also, of the violence in his plays being expressed in a particularly American setting. As with the work of Edward Albee, critics who attacked the "excesses" of Williams¹ work often were making thinly veiled attacked on his sexuality. Homosexuality was not discussed openly at that time, but in Williams¹ plays the themes of desire and isolation show, among other things, the influence of having grown up gay in a homophobic world.
The sixties brought hard times for Tennessee Williams. He had become dependent on drugs, and the problem only grew worse after the death of Frank Merlo in 1961. Merlo¹s death from lung cancer sent Williams into a deep depression that lasted ten years. Williams was also insecure about his work, which was sometimes of inconsistent quality, and he was violently jealous of younger playwrights.
His sister Rose was in his thoughts during his later work. The later plays are not considered Williams¹ best, including the failed Clothes for a Summer Hotel. Overwork and drug use continued to take their toll on him, and on February 23, 1983, Williams choked to death on the lid of one of his pill bottles. He left behind an impressive body of work, including plays that continue to be performed the world over. In his worst work, his writing is melodramatic and overwrought, but at his best Tennessee Williams is a haunting, lyrical, and powerful voice, one of the most important forces in twentieth-century American drama
