Tennessee Williams

Sean Allen THE2100 12 June 2013 Mr. John Schultz Tennessee Williams Thomas Lanier, also known as Tennessee Williams, was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American Theatre. Also he wrote essays, short stories, poetry, screenplays, and novels with also a volume of memoirs. Tennessee’s professional career lasted about 45 years until his death in 1983. Williams saw the birth of hundreds of plays that are considered to be classics on the American stage. Tennessee Williams was an important American playwright who tied in his personal life into his writings, and used women over men in his play, and comparing his work to the other authors. Tennessee Williams used events that happened in his personal life to help him with his writings. He used this in his writings by having the characters getting hurt in the plays just like he did. For example in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof Maggie becomes increasingly more self-conscious as she is again and again refused by her husband. “Williams’s objective was to create humane freedom out of the ashes of experience” (Skloot). This is saying that Tennessee Williams is trying to create freedom for everybody through his works, because he does not want people to have to go through what he had to. Another character that gets hurt to show how his life was is Blanche Dubois from A Streetcar Named Desire. She is so opposed of her past that she chooses to invent a history for herself with the intention of subverting reality. “That of climbing out of an abyss is appropriate in its description of his view of the human condition” (Skloot). Tennessee describes his own situation as a life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before, but it was a good life because it was the sort of life for which the human organism is created. This is a perfect comparison between the life of Tennessee

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