Tennessee Williams was one of the greatest playwrights in the history of the United States. His plays are known for their compelling dialogue, bold themes for the time and the ever-dormant conflict between reality and desire. Through what he himself called "poetic realism," Williams gave everyday objects and actions a strong poetic, symbolic charge. Williams managed to masterfully work out the repressed sexuality and frustrations of his tormented protagonists in striking scenes and evocative language. His plays deal with pent-up aggression, the unbearability of reality, loneliness, melancholy, sexual repression, perversity and homosexuality.

Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, on March 26, 1911. His father and mother both came from wealthy backgrounds, but they were not well off at home. His father was a commercial traveler and, according to his mother, "a man's man," which meant he loved drinking and gambling and was rarely at home. Williams grew up in the comfortable home of his maternal grandfather. When his father got a job at a shoe factory, the family moved north to St. Louis. Williams would never feel at home in the small apartment where they lived and the school where he was made fun of for his Southern accent. He did keep the nickname he received as a "southerner" in Missouri: Tennessee. After working for a while in his father's shoe factory, he got his Bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa in 1938 and published his first story. 

In 1940, his first play, Battle of Angels, was performed. It became a flop. In the following years he had to support himself with a job as an acting waiter in New York and tried to write movie scripts for Hollywood. In 1945, the big break finally came with the production of The Glass Menagerie. Two years later, Williams won the Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire and his name was established as a great American playwright. From the late 1940s to the late 1950s were Williams' best and most prolific years, with such plays as The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, for which he won his second Pulitzer, and The Night of the Iguana (1961), which was filmed in 1964 and starred Richard Burton, Ava Gardner and Deborah Kerr. 

After the sudden death of his ex-partner Frank Merlo in 1963, Williams became increasingly addicted to alcohol and pills, and fell into depression. Despite his addiction, Williams continued to write and publish throughout the 1970s. In 1977, he published Vieux Carré, a highly autobiographical play he had begun in the late 1930s while living in a similar shabby boarding house to that of Mrs. Wire in the play. Williams reworked it as a memory play, in which the narrator is simultaneously the protagonist in his younger years. On Feb. 25, 1983, Tennessee Williams was found dead in a New York City hotel room amid half-empty bottles of wine and pills.