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Essay on Tennessee Williams: His Life and His Art
Tennessee Williams, or Thomas Lanier Williams, was born in Mississippi. He assumed the name "Tennessee" after college, when he decided to become a professional writer. By that time, he had rejected his early lyrical poetry and gothic tales for a new type of literary image. He was afraid that the name of his collateral ancestor, Sidney Lanier (a nineteenth-century Southern poet) would sound too precious for the popular playwright he planned to become. (Hayman Ronald, 1993)
The Tennessee Williams known to the public was largely his own creation: The birth date he used much of his professional life was incorrect. He was actually born in 1911 but laid about his age so as to appear young enough to enter a contest for young playwrights. His devil-may-care attitude, bringing him fame and fortune as a playwright of sexuality and violence, really was a rebellion against his Puritan upbringing. Deep down, he was an intensely serious writer who saw his creativity as a gift and writing as a vocation.
Williams was born in an Episcopal rectory, in Columbus, Mississippi. In his early years, he was pampered by his grandfather, his grandmother, his mother, and his sister Rose. Walter Dakin, his grandfather, was an Episcopal priest who moved around the South ministering to a number of small congregations. The Delta country, around Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Williams spent his childhood, was to become his fictional "Two Rivers County." The heat, the storms, the floods of that region, the division into social classes, the colorful imagery and rhythms of the speech were to shape his setting and dialogue. Many of the people in that town were to provide the names and details of the characters he later used in his plays and stories: families like the Cutreres, Bobos, Wingfields, and first names like Brick, Blanche, and Baby Doll....
