Tennessee Williams  (1911–1983) The Glass Menagerie LINKS The Glass Menagerie http://www.susqu.edu/ac_depts/arts_sci/english/lharris/class/WILLIAMS/titlepag.htm There are a lot of interesting images and background information on the play at this site developed at Susquehanna University. Tennessee Williams Scholars' Conference http://www.mtsu.edu/~english/twsc.htm This site contains information related to the conference, including programs which list many sholars who are currently doing work on Williams. BIOGRAPHY Tennessee Williams (1911–1983) Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi, but grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. His "lonely and miserable" childhood, as he characterized it, was in large part due to an unsympathetic father and to schoolmates who often taunted him because of his small size and lack of physical prowess. A year before he was to graduate from the University of Missouri, his father removed him from college and got him a job with the International Shoe Company, where he worked by day and wrote by night. Three years later, he suffered a nervous breakdown and, while recovering at his grandparents' home in Memphis, Tennessee, wrote his first play. With his grandparents' financial help, he attended the University of Iowa, and earned a B.A. in 1938. In 1939, on the basis of a compilation of four one-act plays called American Blues (published in 1948), Williams won a playwriting grant and recognition as a promising playwright. The promise was fulfilled in 1945 with The Glass Menagerie. This was followed two years later with the equally successful A Streetcar Named Desire (for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1948). From then until his death, Williams's reputation as a premier American dramatist grew with such plays as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1958), and The Night of the Iguana (1961). Williams also published six volumes of prose and three volumes of poetry.