Today's Out Spotlight was one of the most influential American playwrights. Winner of countless awards and accolades for his writing, he transformed the darkest aspects of human existence into poetic theater. Today's Out Spotlight is Tennessee William.

Tennessee Williams was born as Thomas Lanier Williams on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi, the second child of Edwina and Cornelius Coffin (C.C.) Williams. His grandfather, Walter Dakin, was the local Episcopal priest, and his maternal grandmother, Rose, was a music teacher. His father was a hard-drinking traveling shoe salesman who spent most of his time away from home. His mother, Edwina, was the archetype of the ‘Southern belle’, whose social aspirations tilted toward snobbery and whose behavior could be neurotic and hysterical. Shortly after Williams birth, his grandfather Dakin was assigned to a parish in Clarksdale, Mississippi and Williams' early childhood was spent in the parsonage there.

He was the middle child between older sister Rose, and a younger brother, Dakin. ‘Tom’, as he was called in his youth, developed a close bond with his sister. Theater scholar Allean Hale notes that, born only sixteen months apart, they were “as inseparable as twins, sometimes referred to as ‘The Couple’.” Rose and their nursemaid, Ozzie, were his only companions as growing. Hale speculates that growing up in a female-dominated environment gave Williams empathy for the woman characters he created as a playwright. Shy, fragile and predisposed to emotional disturbances, eventually to the point of mental illness, Rose inspired a host of characters in his fiction.

At the age of 7, his father got a job in St Louis, MO, and the family moved where he was raised the middle child of three. Williams disliked city life, and his father’s alcoholism conflicted with his mother’s puritanical and Southern upbringing more and more, to the point where home life became painful.

From 1929 to 1931, he attended the University of Missouri, in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes. While the university's School of Journalism was regarded one of the world's best, Williams found his classes boring. He was soon entering his poetry, essays, stories, and plays in writing contests, hoping to earn extra income. His first submitted play was Beauty is the Word, followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning. As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a contest.

He joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not seem to have fit in well with his fraternity brothers. The"brothers found him shy and socially backward, a loner who spent most of his time at the typewriter." After he failed military training in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe factory .

Although Williams, then 21, hated the monotony of the blue-collar world, the job "forced him out of the pretentious gentility" of his upbringing. His dislike of the nine-to-five work routine drove him to write even more than before, and he gave himself a goal of writing one story a week, working on Saturday and Sunday, into the night.

Overworked, unhappy and lacking any further success with his writing, by his twenty-fourth birthday he had suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job. Memories of this period, and a particular factory co-worker, became part of the character Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. By the mid-1930s his father's increasing alcoholism and abusive temper (he had part of his ear bitten off in a poker game fight) finally led his mother to separate from him although they never divorced.

In 1936 Williams enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis where he wrote the play Me Vashya. In 1938 he earned a degree from the University of Iowa, where he wrote Spring Storm.

That same year he graduated Williams published his first story under his new professional name, Tennessee Williams, a college nickname he reclaimed because some say was for the love of his years in the South, some say for his love of the South, and others said he change his name to Tennessee, after his father’s birth state.

In the years following graduation, he worked a number of jobs across the US. A number of his early works were staged, but they received universally bad reviews. During this time, he also came to terms with his homosexuality, and began a lifelong addiction to anonymous sex, which, along with heavy drinking and frantic periods of creativity, became a continuous bulwark against chronic depression.

Williams remained close to his sister Rose, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young adult and was institutionalized following a lobotomy in 1943, that his mother had done in hopes of curing her schizophrenia. Not only was it a failure but it froze Rose in time psychologically in 1943. He visited her at the facilities where she spent most of her adult life and paying for her care. Williams had lost his closest friend and fell into an even deeper depression may have contributed to his alcoholism and his dependence on various combinations of amphetamines and barbiturates.

After some early attempts at heterosexual relationships, by the late 1930s Williams had accepted his homosexuality. In New York he joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham and his then partner Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940 Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan, a young Canadian dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Kiernan left him for a woman and marriage he was distraught, and Kiernan's death four years later at 26 delivered another blow.

In the late 1930s, as the young playwright struggled to have his work accepted, he supported himself with a string of menial jobs (including a notably disastrous stint as caretaker on a chicken ranch outside Los Angeles). In 1939, with the help of his agent, Audrey Wood, he was awarded a $1,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in recognition of his play Battle of Angels which was produced in Boston in 1940, but poorly received.
Using the remainder of the Rockefeller funds, Williams moved to New Orleans in 1939 to write for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a federally funded program begun by President Franklin D. Roosevelt which was created to put people back to work and helped many artists, musicians and writers survive during the Great Depression.

While a scriptwriter at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio, Williams wrote an original screenplay the company rejected. It was reworked into a play. "The Glass Menagerie" earned the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and launched Williams’ playwriting career.

The Glass Menagerie, essentially a description of his family life in St. Louis, became a hit, first in Chicago, and then on Broadway. From this point on, Williams’ plays became more personal and simultaneously more successful. The Glass Menagerie won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for best play of the season.
Elia Kazan (who directed many of Williams' greatest successes) said of Williams: "Everything in his life is in his plays, and everything in his plays is in his life."

The huge success of another play, A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 secured his reputation as a great playwright. Although widely celebrated and increasingly wealthy, he was still restless and insecure in the grip of fears that he would not be able to duplicate his success. His life was characterized by increasing success but also increasing restlessness – he never spent more than a few months at a time in one place, moving constantly between New York, New Orleans, Key West, and Europe.

On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodriguez was, by all accounts, loving and loyal but also prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking, so the relationship was a tempestuous one. Nevertheless, in February 1946 Rodriguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment and they lived and traveled together until late 1947 when Williams ended the affair. Rodriguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s.

In My Life, Elia Kazan’s autobiography. Kazan, who directed both the stage and film versions of A Streetcar Named Desire, writes about his difficulty understanding the love-hate relationship between Stanley and Blanche in a play now considered among the best of the 20th century. But it all became clear when he witnessed an altercation between Williams and Rodriguez: “If Tennessee was Blanche, Pancho was Stanley.

Often set in the South and featuring characters seeking salvation and meaningful human connections, Williams plays were infused with aspects of his personal struggles. He sparked controversy by including gay characters.

His award-winning plays include "A Streetcar Named Desire", "The Rose Tattoo" (1951), "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" (1955) and "The Night of the Iguana" (1961). "A Streetcar Named Desire," "The Rose Tattoo" and "The Night of the Iguana" were adapted into Oscar-winning movies and starred such stars as Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh.

Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a teenaged Italian boy to whom he provided financial assistance for several years afterward (a situation which planted the seed of Williams' first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). When he returned to New York that fall, he met and fell in love with Frank Phillip Merlo, an occasional actor and World War II vet. It was beginning of his only serious romantic relationship.

Merlo, who became Williams' personal secretary, took on most of the details of their domestic life and provided a period of happiness and stability as well as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. Their years together, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida, were Williams' happiest and most productive.

Merlo was a huge calming influence on Williams, who was suffering from a deepening hypochondria and increasing addiction problem during that time.

The relationship lasted until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it.

Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and Williams returned to take care of him until his death on September 21, 1963.

Merlo’s death from lung cancer dealt Williams an almost fatal blow, as he had feared, in the years following Merlo's death Williams was plunged into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use resulting in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. He submitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson – known popularly as Dr. Feelgood – who used increasing amounts of amphetamines to overcome his depression and combined these with prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia. Williams appeared several times in interviews nearly incoherent, and his reputation both as a playwright and as a public personality suffered. He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.

Despite these successes, Williams he was plagued with depressed. Failed pieces, like Camino Real, wrecked his nerves, and his addictions deepened.

He withdrew almost completely from human contact and spent morning to night under the influence of a cocktail of drugs and alcohol. He continued to write constantly, but his work deteriorated rapidly in quality. His mother Edwina and younger brother Dakin attempted to intervene, sending him to a number of hospitals and mental institutes, but he never fully recovered.

Williams passed away in February 25, 1983, at the age of 71, found choked to death on the cap of an eyedrop bottle. Examination found his constant use of drugs and alcohol had suppressed his gag reflex, leading to his death.

Williams received two Pulitzer Prizes, four Drama Critics’ Circle Awards, and a Tony Award for Best Play.

"To me, it was providential to be an artist, a great act of providence that I was able to turn my borderline psychosis into creativity."