After Tennessee finished high school, he went to the University of Missouri for three years until he failed ROTC. At the university he began to write more and discovered alcohol as a cure for his over-sensitive shyness. After his third year, his father got him a position in the shoe factory. He worked there for two years; he later classified this time as the most miserable two years of his life. He spent dreary days at the warehouse and then devoted his nights to writing poetry, plays, and short stories. After two years of working all day and writing all night, he had a nervous breakdown and went to Memphis, Tennessee, to recuperate with his grandfather, who had moved there after retirement. His years of frustration and his dislike of the warehouse job are reflected directly in the character of Tom Wingfield, who followed essentially the same pattern that Williams himself followed. In fact, Tennessee gave this character his own first name, Tom.
During all of this time, Tennessee had been winning small prizes for various types of writing, but nothing significant had yet been written. After his rest in Memphis, he returned to the university (Washington University in St. Louis), where he became associated with a writers’ group. Here he wrote and had some of his earlier works produced. He later attended the State University of Iowa and wrote two long plays for a creative writing seminar. After leaving Iowa, he drifted around the country, picking up odd jobs and collecting experiences until he received a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1940. He spent his time writing until the money was exhausted and then he worked again at odd jobs until his first great success with The Glass Menagerie in 1944-45.
Williams has used his early life in most of his plays. His favorite setting is southern, with southern characters. In Stanley Kowalski, we see many of the rough, poker-playing, manly qualities that his own father possessed. In Laura and Amanda, we find very close echoes to his own mother and sister. In Tom Wingfield, we find again the struggles and aspirations of the writer himself re-echoed in literary form. Thus he has objectified his own subjective experiences in his literary works.
Tennessee Williams’ plays are still controversial. There are many critics who call his works sensational and shocking, but his plays have attracted the widest audience of any living American dramatist, and he is established as America’s most important dramatist.
