Tennessee Williams Research Paper

Tennessee Williams (1945) reveals how Laura is trapped trying to relive her past love for

    Tennessee Williams is one of the greatest American playwrights. He was constantly shocking audiences with themes such as homosexuality, drug addictions, and rape. He broke free from taboos on such subjects, paving the way for future playwrights. He also was a very good writer. One of the things he is famous for is his dialogue, which is very poetic.

Born in the early 1900s in Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams is an American playwright. His plays are famous for including romance and human frustration. According to many critics, Williams “pushed drama into new fields, stretched the limits of the individual play and became one of the founders of the so-called ‘New Drama’ (“Tennessee Williams”). One of Williams’ most famous plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, was the second play in history to win the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Written in 1947, this play focuses on the emotional life of Blanche DuBois, a school teacher from Mississippi who has suddenly arrived at her sister Stella’s apartment in New Orleans, jobless, moneyless, and most importantly, propertyless.Throughout

Nevertheless, the playwright who focused on the dark side of human beings was Tennessee Williams. He was born in the eastern town, Columbus, on March 26, 1911. His father was an intimidating, impulsive, alcoholic, traveling salesman who did not spend much time with his family and was not devoted to a stable family life. Williams’ mother, Edwina, was the center of his life since she raised him essentially. According to Donald Spoto (12), “she was a beautiful, strong willed, socially ambitious woman who observed every prescription of Southern etiquette and charm.” Williams had a strong relationship with his elder sister, Rose. He said once “She was an ideal playmate. She was very charming, very beautiful. She

The characters that come alive in Williams' works represent people from his life. Amanda Wingfield from The Glass Menagerie holds strong resemblance to Tennessee's mother Edwina Williams. Williams described his mother as "a woman whose endurance and once fine qualities continued to flourished alongside a narrowness of perception and only the dimmest awareness of human feeling (Susquehanna. "Biographical Criticism)." Amanda easily mirrors this description of Edwina because of her selfishness concerning Laura's being unattached; Edwina was much like Amanda, getting numerous gentlemen callers as a young woman. Laura Windfield in The Glass Menagerie is very much like Williams' sister Rose Williams. Rose was institutionalized for having schizophrenia and was not able to interact with the outside world. Having pleurisy, Laura was also kept from being a part of the world she longed for. By using examples of people from his own life in

Established as one of the most prolific playwrights of the 20th century, Tennessee Williams used his writing as a form of therapy. The author came from a troubled background consisting of alcoholism, mental breakdowns, and general unhappiness; Williams exploited these unfortunate events and allowed them to motivate his literature. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche DuBois’ struggles represent the reality of people’s lives, “an enduring concern of [Williams’] throughout his writing career (Henthorne 1). Blanche captures our focus with her seemingly sincere and fragile nature, but it is later revealed that this is just an illusion within her own mind. She resides in a world of fantasy to shield herself against the harsh threats of reality and her own fears. Blanche’s main objective in the play is to keep herself from falling apart in a world of cruelty through alcoholism and illusion. Through the characterization of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams depicts the coping mechanism of fantasy and its detrimental repercussions by exploring the specific experiences that eventually impede her happiness.

The eldest of seven and son of a widow, Dr. Williams -at the tender age of nine- was called upon to be a man, before most little boys his age had memorized their street's address. His early introduction into personal responsibility was the foundation upon which he would build his character. Taking on side

Their father also read Dante and the Bible to them frequently. Williams was taught around literature and arts. When Williams was a teenager his mother, Raquel took he and his brother, Edgar to for two years so they could study in Switzerland and France. They went to the Château de Lancy close to Geneva and the Lycée Condorcet in Paris. After Williams’s made their way back to the United States in 1899, their father, William Gorge enrolled them into Horace Mann High School. In this most important time period, Williams found his love for poetry at Horace Mann High School. He also had other interest in school; he like mathematics and science. His parents pushed him to be a perfectionist and a hard worker to accomplish these dreams of success that they had for him.

Tennessee Williams was a shy child yet at the same time outdoing. Williams didn’t have

Tennessee Williams, an American playwright, has been known as the most prominent American southern dramatist. He won his first Pulitzer Prize with Streetcar Named Desire. In this play, Williams shows the need for belief in human value against the natural realistic world. He uses symbols to develop the characters and theme of illusion verses reality within Streetcar Named Desire. The two main characters are Blanche DuBois, an aristocrat southern belle, and Stanley Kowalski the "gaudy seed-bearer." Blanche lives in the superficial world she has made for herself while Stanley lives in the harsh realistic world. The confrontation between Blanche and Stanley is shown throughout

He went on to attend Central high school where he was the only student of clor in the entire school, but that didn’t slow him down. ‘It was his scholarly performance that distinguished him. He served as editor in chief of the school paper, president of the literary society, and class poet. His poetry grew more sophisticated with his repeated readings of John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Burns; later he would add American poets John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Whitcomb Riley to his list of favorites as he searched ardently for his own poetic voice. But it was his reading of Irwin Russell and other writers in the plantation tradition that led him into difficulty as he searched for an authentic poetic diction that would incorporate the voices of his parents and the stories they told.” (Braxton) He had many of other outstanding credentials in his high school career as well. He was published by several newspapers and someone else who has a very historical significance to Ohio. “By the age of fourteen, Dunbar had poems published in the Dayton Herald. While in high school he edited the Dayton Tattler, a short-lived black newspaper published by classmate Orville Wright.”

Tennessee Williams is one of the most influential dramatist and playwright in the history of American theatre and literature. From his works like A Streetcar Named Desire, to the works like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams exemplified his own artistic and distinct style that still stands as the forefront of the classic American Theatre (Bloom, 2000). Born and raised in the South, the plays of Williams used the quirks and characters of the region. His plays portrayed his gift of beautiful language, and his boldness to explore the untapped themes such as sexuality, madness and addiction (Heintzelman & Smith Howard, 2005). The issues and themes that have been projected in his work are also the ones which he faced in his real life (Heintzelman & Smith Howard, 2005). The archetypes of Williams’s plays – emotionally absent fathers, domineering southern matriarchs, and child look women engulfed with madness, are themes which are taken from the life of his own family members (Heintzelman & Smith Howard, 2005). He was open about the fact that he was gay, and about his substance abuse

In 1928, at the age of 16 Williams was first published after placing third in an essay contest. Then in 1929, he enrolled at the University of Missouri, to pursue a degree in journalism at his father’s insistence. However, in 1931 before he had obtained a degree Williams’ father demanded he withdraw; after which Williams began working at the same company with his father. Unhappy with his job and distressed by the fact that his

Tennessee Williams was born and raised in the South. He held plenty of southern ideals and expressed himself as a southern writer. He put hundreds of symbolism into his work that let the reader take a look into his life and what he thought. Williams usually put symbols into his plays to romanticize and make the reader feel sorry for the south and hate the forces that destroyed it. In A Streetcar Named Desire Tennessee Williams wanted to make the reader feel like the Northern aggression raped the old South. By having Stanley as the strong, aggressive, urban, North and Blanche as the frail, poor, rural, old South.

Williams Carlos Williams was a popular writer during the 1950s and 1960s“Williams was born September 17th 1883 in Rutherford New Jersey. His parents are William George and Raquel Williams.” His father had a huge impact on his writing. He “Made it a point to expose his son to classic works of literature and art, including Shakespeare, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Dante’s inferno. This helped to cement William’s love of Literature”( ). The start of his career began in high school. “Here he began his extensive study of poetry under William Abbot, who took Williams under his wing to share classic works of poetry in English”(“William Carlos Williams”). He eventually graduated with a C average but managed to pass a test that allowed him to get into