book

Life and Works of Tennessee Williams

21 Pages 2825 Words 1557 Views

Playwright Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, the second child of Cornelius and Edwina Williams' three children. Williams had a complicated relationship with his father. While living in Mississippi, Williams lived a rather happy childhood. When Williams and his family moved to St.Louis, Missouri, Williams care free nature of a boy had been stripped away by his new urban setting. At home the constant fighting between his parents, often made home a tense place to live. “It was just a wrong marriage,” Williams later wrote. Despite the struggles at home, the Williams family turmoil fueled for Williams playwright’s art. When Williams turned eighteen, he enrolled at the University of Missouri, where Williams studied journalism. Against hiss will, Williams was withdrawn from the school by his father. At the age of twenty-eight, Williams left his family, and decided to move to New Orleans, Louisiana. While living in New Orleans, Williams changed his name to Tennessee Williams. Williams gained recognition from his work “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie.” As Williams grew older, he fell into some bad habit involving drugs and alcohol, which hospitalized him in 1969. On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead in his hotel room in New York City. Despite his death, Williams left behind his plays and books, which centered on the major themes of southern matriarchs, fatherly abuse, feminine childhoods, homosexuality, South American influences and drug and alcohol abuse. Critics, recognized a poetic innovation in Williams work, who, refusing to be confined within the usual styles of normal playwriting patterns, In the New Republic Stark Young stated "the usual sterilities of our playwriting patterns,"(Stark 3) Williams changed modern plays and pushed the boundaries of individual plays. While glorifying The Glass Menagerie " as the pinnacle of what modern playwriting should be, In Broadway, Brooks Atkinson publicizes that"Williams remembrance of things past gave the theater distinction as a literary medium." Forty years following the opening play, "one of the best works to have come out of the American theater."(C.W.E. Bigsby 2) Williams used his own persona to create his works. Williams saw himself as a timid, emotional, but a talented author snared in a society where brutality took the place of love, and sadness was the normal state for citizens. Williams noticed that in America their was an evil, an evil in which he must purge the nation of with his poetic vision (Harold Clurman 5). Williams recognized his one of his major theme as a protection of the Old Southern view.(Walker 442-443) He was ironically, realistic as well as aware of the inaccessibility of that for which he longed for. As written by John Gassner,“a precise naturalism and continued to work toward a fusion of naturalistic detail with symbolism and poetic sensibility rare in American playwriting (Gassner 6)." Many of Williams peers answered to the present circumstances with a group complaint of his work, despite the bad reviews, Williams following a a small number of initial tries at the category. Williams maintained in a discussion that he wrote of the South, Williams selected to introduce characters filled with ambiguity, riddles, and suspiciousness. At this time Williams may not portray social actuality, "the intensity with which he feels whatever he does feel is so deep, is so great" that his audiences sees another form of reality, "the reality in the spirit(Miller 3)." Clurman argues that although Williams did not promote propaganda, collective narration is built into his portraiture. The internal suffering of a character, symbolized the missing South. Williams turned toward an unpleasant world, in which would be the setting for most of his materials (Clurman 7). Williams's creations displayed an enduring trouble with the setting and how it would influence the characters. Williams's characters are cursed by a past that they have trouble believing in. Interested in yesterday or tomorrow as opposed to the knowing of the tangible and passionate wounds the years inflict, they have an imaginary value (Clurman 7-8). "Only a writer who had survived in the lower depths of a sultry Southern city could know the characters as intimately as Williams did and be so thoroughly steeped in the aimless sprawl of the neighborhood life."(Atkinson 2) Williams's plays are occupied by a rather sizable amount of actors, "Garrulous Grotesques" a term used by J. L. Styan; these figures include "untouchables whom he touches with frankness and mercy,"(J. L. Styan 5). Among the crew are the romantics who perform in dedication to the "old verities and truths of the heart (Weales 12).” Which encompass ruined nobleman. As Bigsby branded them "martyrs for a world which has already slipped away unmourned"(Bigsby 2). Numerous of these personas were prone to reenact the scenes in whi

Read Full Essay