Tennessee Williams Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Tennessee Williams - Research Paper Example In 1939, he became the youngest playwright to receive the $1,000 Rockefeller Grant. In 1944, his play The Glass Menagerie had a very successful run in Chicago and a year later in Broadway. This first major critical success was followed by many other Broadway hits such as plays like A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, and A Rose Tattoo. In 1948 he received his first Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire. In 1955, his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof earned him his second Pulitzer Prize. In 1950 and 1951 his works The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were made into motion pictures. This made him reach out to a worldwide audience. His association with movie legends, according to, Darryl E. Haley, â€Å"establishes the playwright as one of the most important figures in the twentieth-century drama†. Tennessee Williams fell in love with Frank Merlo in 1947. She was a steadying influence in Williams rather disordered life. However, in 1961, she died of lung cancer and Williams went into a deep depression that lasted for ten years. According to Mel Gussow (1983), â€Å"it, was 1955, and after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, there was a noticeable decline in his work. To keep going, he began relying on a ritualistic combination of ingredients -strong coffee, cigarettes, drugs, and alcohol†. In 1983, on February 24, Tennessee Williams choked to death. According to reports he choked on an eye drop bottle cap at the Hotel Elysee in New York. However, the police report suggested that it was his use of drugs and alcohol that contributed to his death. He was buried in St. Louis, Missouri. On his death, Marlon Brando said, ‘‘I always felt like Tennessee and I were compatriots. He told the truth as best he perceived it and never turned away from things that beset or frightened him. We are all diminished by his death. Williams in his lifetime wrote twenty-five full-length plays, dozens of short plays and screenplays, sixty short stories, more than hundred poems, two novels, a novella and an autobiography.