St. Louis Blues....

"Tom as a freshman at the University of Missouri"

"We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it. "

Tennessee Williams

“I was on my way out the door and I saw all of these cars lined up in the parking lot with their trunks open.”

Sharon Rainey quote

St. Louis West End Grocery Sites.
Glen E. Holt and Sharon Rainey
Sharon Rainey
Urban Studies , 1978

Particular Collection : Jacqueline Waechter , several Views with Numerical Art 2009

St. Louis Public Library - Lasting Impressions: German-Americans in St. Louis

"Thomas Lanier Williams was born in Columbus, Mississippi. His mother, the former Edwina Estelle Dakin, was the daughter of an Episcopalian clergyman. She was always proud to say, "The Dakins could trace themselves back to the Normans." Williams's father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was a travelling salesman for a shoe company. He could trace his ancestry back to the French Huguenots, and to politicians and soldiers in North Carolina and Tennessee. According to William's brother Dakin, their father was very bombastic, he cursed a lot and there was a great deal of coldness between him and his son, who loved books but was not interested in sports.

Williams was brought up in his grandfather's home where his parents lived. The family moved to St. Louis in 1918, where Williams realized the difference between rich people and the poor - and they were poor. Williams's Deep South accent and poverty made him a target of his schoolmates and earned him later from his university classmates the nickname "Tennessee". In 1928 Williams traveled wirh his grandfather to Europe and inspired by its atmosphere and culture he wrote much poetry. He entered college during the great American depression. The family's lack of funds forced him to leave after a couple of years and take a job in the same shoe company that employed his father. "I hated the job," he said in an interview in the 1940s, "but I stuck with it until I had saved enough money to move on to the University of Iowa." Williams worked as a waiter in Iowa, roamed down the shores of the Pacific states, and read the writings of D.H. Lawrence, stopping in New Mexico to meet the author's family and friends."

"Time rushes toward us with its hospital tray of infinitely varied narcotics, even while it is preparing us for its inevitably fatal operation." (from The Rose Tattoo, 1950)

Williams had started to write in his childhood and continued to produce short stories while still working at the factory. When his health broke down, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Memphis. As a playwright Williams began his career while studying at the University of Missouri and Washington University, St. Louis. During this period he became aware that he had a homosexual tendency. In an interview Williams confessed, that he had his first consummated homosexual love affair at the age of 28.

Williams received his B.A. degree from University of Iowa, where his SPRING STORM was presented despite unfavorable reaction of Professor E.C. Mabie. In 1936 he wrote: ..."most of the literary experimentation is now being done by incompetent young nobodies like myself who have absolutely nothing to lose, no money, no reputation, no public . . . by writing any way they damned please!'' BATTLE OF ANGELS (1940) was produced by the Theatre Guild, starring Miriam Hopkins. The play was submitted to John Gassner, a drama critic and historian, with whom Williams studied at the New School of Social Research in New York. "I'm glad now that the play was not a success," Williams said later. "If it had been, it would have gone to my head and I would have thought I knew all there was to know about playwriting." In 1939 Williams was awarded a special commendation (and $100) to playwrights under 25 - he was nearly 28 and had just started working as a shoe clerk.

During WW II years Williams worked for a short time in Hollywood writing for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film company. The first critical triumph come in 1945 with THE GLASS MENAGERIE, in which Williams used techniques he had learned from the cinema. The Glass Menagerie ran on Broadway for over a year and received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. In the "memory play" Tom Wingfield recalls his life in St. Louis with his mother Amanda, a faded Southern belle, and his sister Laura, withdrawn and slightly crippled girl who collects glass animal figures. "Memory takes a lot of poetic license," Williams wrote in the first scene. "It omits some details; others are exaggerated according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart."

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) - original name Thomas Lanier Williams

"While his father traveled, Tom was mostly brought up, and overprotected, by his mother - particularly after he contracted diphtheria at the age of 5. By the time the family moved to St. Louis, the pattern was clear. Young Tom retreated into himself. He made up and told stories, many of them scary.

In the fall of 1929 he went off to the University of Missouri to study journalism. When his childhood girlfriend, Hazel Kramer, also decided to enroll at Missouri, his father said he would withdraw him, and succeeded in breaking up the incipient romance. It was his only known romantic relationship with a woman.

In a state of depression, Tom dropped out of school and, at his father's instigation, took a job as a clerk in a shoe company. It was, he recalled, ''living death.''

To survive, every day after work he retreated to his room and wrote - stories, poems, plays - through the night. The strain finally led to a nervous breakdown."

Poem to Hazel