Perhaps because his early life was spent in an atmosphere of genteel culture, the greatest shock to Williams was the move his family made when he was about twelve. The father accepted a position in a shoe factory in St. Louis and moved the family from the expansive Episcopal home in the South to an ugly tenement building in St. Louis. Their cramped apartment and the ugliness of the city life seemed to make a lasting impression on the boy. Here in school he was often ridiculed for his southern accent, and he was never able to find acceptance. Likewise, his father, who had been a traveling salesman, was suddenly at home most of the time.
It was here in St. Louis that Williams' slightly older sister, Rose, began to cease to develop as a person and failed to cross over the barrier from childhood to adulthood. She, like Laura in The Glass Menagerie, began to live in her own world of glass ornaments. Eventually, she had to be placed in an institution. She became the model for Laura Wingfield. The description of Laura's room, just across the alley from the Paradise Dance Club, is also a description of his sister's room. Laura's desire to lose herself from the world was a characteristic of his own sister. And both were seen by Williams as being shy, quiet, but lovely girls who were not able to cope with the modern world.
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.
