Tennessee Williams

Tennessee Williams was steeped in the culture of the Mississippi Delta - a region with a long history and a peculiar culture. The American South had developed a strong literary tradition in the early years of the twentieth century. Beginning with the poets and philosophers of the Fugitive Group at Vanderbilt University (Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allan Tate, and others), the Southern Renaissance was to mark the beginning of a unique tradition. While rejecting much of the mythology of the South as a Gone with the Wind culture, full of lovely ladies, handsome gentlemen, and contented slaves, these Fugitives stiff cherished the best part of the Southern heritage. The qualities of courtly manners, traditional Christian faith and moral values, lyrical and colorful speech, and a strong sense of place and of history were to mark this new movement.

The most interesting offshoot of this literary tradition was to be the Mississippi prose writers - like William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. They used the geography, the history, the traditions, the habits, and the people of this region to write a host of tales. Their novels and short stories range in tone from grim to comic, in character from wealthy landowners to ex-slaves and poor whites. The stories have delighted audiences all over the world, including Tennessee Williams.

While sharing their love of the folk of the Delta, where he was born, Williams had little interest in the literary forms these other Southerners had se lected. The novel just did not match his talents. He did try the form, as well as the short story, but gradually he came to understand that his genius lay with drama. For him, though he was a talented prose writer, short stories most often proved to be merely the rough drafts out of which his plays were to develop.

Prior to the success of Tennessee Williams, the South had not been a regular part of the theatrical scene. The real center of American theatre was in cities, particularly in New York. Southerners rarely wrote plays that would appeal to New York audiences. There were some exceptions: Just before Williams hit Broadway, Green Pastures, a review that derived from Roark Bradford's comic rendition of Black sermons, introduced Southern religion to urban audiences. Poor white Southerners had been objects of condescension in Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre, which also went from novel to play. And the far more serious and theatrical Lillian Heilman was beginning to develop her richer analysis of the castes and classes of the South in The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest. Hellman was only partially a Southerner, having been raised in New York as well as New Orleans, and having been educated in the North. One of the first plays that Williams saw when he had his first professional visit to New York in 1939 was The Little Foxes. Shortly afterwards, he began to talk of a "Southern trilogy." His view of the South, however, was far more sensitive and complex than Hellman's. Williams wanted to portray the South in a more subjective way than Hellman had, bringing out the full range of Southern speech and manners, the way that the writers of the Irish Renaissance had done for the folk of Ireland.