1. KELSO HIGH SCHOOL English Department

2. A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE

3. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

4.  Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in Mississippi  The nickname “Tennessee” was given to him at college by a fellow student who confused Mississippi where he was born with another Southern state - Tennessee

5. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  The young Thomas was badly affected by the marriage difficulties suffered by his mother and father and as a child found consolation in reading and in later life writing  He was bedridden for two years as a child due to severe illness and grew into a withdrawn, effeminate adolescent whose chief solace was writing  In 1929 he became a student at the University of Missouri and began to make a name for himself as a writer

6. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  The Depression put an end to his studies and in 1931 he became a clerk in a shoe firm  He was miserable and suffered a nervous breakdown  After the Depression when his family’s finances improved he became a student at Washington University in St Louis. There he wrote a number of plays performed by amateur companies

7. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  During this time his sister Rose became mentally unstable accusing her father of attacking her  The sexual content of her fantasies spelt scandal and so alarmed her mother that she agreed to a pre-frontal lobotomy to be performed on Rose in 1937

8. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  Tennessee was away at university during this time and never forgave himself for not having been there to prevent the operation  He was never to forgive his mother for her part in the operation  There is much of Rose in the characterisation of Blanche

9. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  There then followed a period of drifting for Williams which took him to New Orleans – the setting for Streetcar  During his time in New Orleans he became a practising homosexual  He continued to write and began to win prizes for his work

10. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  During 1942 – 1947 he wrote two of his most famous plays – The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar named Desire  Streetcar opened to great acclaim in 1947. Williams was by now a wealthy man, having sold the screen rights for both the plays and deriving a good income from the stage productions as well

11. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  However, success did not bring happiness. He underwent psychotherapy for depression; his drug taking and drinking increased and his constant search for sexual encounters caused many problems to his live-in partner, Frank Merlo

12. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  As a result his writing deteriorated. Though he wrote several plays between 1962 and his death, none were really successful  He was committed to a mental hospital by his brother, but after his release he was so befuddled by drugs and alcohol that he appeared indifferent to his failures

13. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  He died in New York on the 24 th February 1983 in a hotel named Elysee - an ironically appropriate name that recalls Elysian Fields in Streetcar  His death was caused by choking to death on a medicine cap bottle in a alcohol related incident one month short of his seventy-second birthday

14. TENNESSEE WILLIAMS  In his long career he wrote:- twenty-five full length plays five screenplays over seventy one-act plays hundreds of short stories two novels poetry memoir