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Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III (March 26, 1911 - February 25, 1983) was an American playwright. Along with Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama. After years of obscurity, he became suddenly famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944), a play that closely reflected his own unhappy family background. This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959).

From 1929 to 1931, he attended the University of Missouri, in Columbia, where he enrolled in journalism classes. Williams found his classes boring, however, and was distracted by his unrequited love for a girl. 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 (1930), followed by Hot Milk at Three in the Morning (1932). As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a writing competition.  At University of Missouri, Williams joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, but he did not fit in well with his fraternity brothers. According to Hale, the "brothers found him shy and socially backward, a loner who spent most of his time at the typewriter." After he failed a military training course in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe Company factory. Although Williams, then 21, hated the monotony, the job "forced him out of the pretentious gentility" of his upbringing, which had, according to Hale, "tinged him with [his mother's] snobbery and detachment from reality." His dislike of his new nine-to-five routine drove him to write even more than before, and he set himself a goal of writing one story a week, working on Saturday and Sunday, often late into the night. His mother recalled his intensity:  "Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house. Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes."  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 Edwina 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 (1937). By 1938 he had moved on to University of Iowa, where he completed his undergraduate degree and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English. He later studied at the Dramatic Workshop of The New School in New York City. Speaking of his early days as a playwright and referring to an early collaborative play called Cairo, Shanghai, Bombay!, produced while he was a part of an amateur summer theater group in Memphis, Tennessee, Williams wrote, "The laughter ... enchanted me. Then and there the theatre and I found each other for better and for worse. I know it's the only thing that saved my life." Around 1939, he adopted "Tennessee Williams" as his professional name.

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Tennessee Williams