Between 1929 and 1938, Williams attended three colleges and worked at the International Shoe Company. In 1937 Williams was attending the University of Iowa—from which he would graduate in 1938—when his sister Rose was institutionalized for schizophrenia. Williams was close to his sister and feared for much of his life that he, too, would lose his mind. While Williams was away from St. Louis, his mother consented to have a lobotomy performed on Rose. Because this was one of the first lobotomies in the country, there was no cost for the operation. Rose lost her anxieties, but also much of her mind, slipping into a dreamlike existence that lasted the rest of her long life. Williams never forgave his mother for allowing the operation.

Williams’s early years as a writer were hard, and he worked with great discipline and energy. For his short plays, he received a $100 prize from the Group Theatre in 1939; that year, he also received a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant. He began to write under the name of Tennessee Williams. His Battle of Angels was produced in Boston and in New York by the Theatre Guild in 1940, closing after two weeks in New York.

For two years Williams traveled and wrote, spending much of 1942 in New York City surviving on the odd jobs of bell hop, elevator operator, and movie usher.

In 1943, his agent, Audrey Wood, secured him a job as writer at MGM in Los Angeles. He developed a script, The Gentleman Caller, for the company, but they turned it down, giving him the rights to the work. Williams revised the film script into a stage play, and in 1945, The Glass Menagerie opened on Broadway, starring Laurette Taylor and Eddie Dowling, and playing for 563 performances. The play won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Sidney Howard Memorial Award, and the Donaldson Award, as well as great acclaim. Williams’s reputation was assured, and he was able to write with some financial security.

In 1947 Williams began his relationship with Frank Merlo, his secretary and lover. It would last until Merlo died of lung cancer in 1963.

In general, Williams’s early plays were well-received, popular and critical successes. They include 1947’s A Streetcar Named Desire (855 performances), directed by Elia Kazan, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the Drama Critics Circle Award, and the Donaldson Award, 1948’s Summer and Smoke, 1951’s The Rose Tatoo (300 performances), 1955’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (164 performances), 1959’s Sweet Bird of Youth (375 performances), and 1961’s The Night of the Iguana (316 performances). There were, of course, failures as well, such as 1953’s Camino Real (60 performances), 1955’s 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (49 performances), and 1957’s Orpheus Descending (68 performances).

In 1957 Williams, depressed by the poor reception of Orpheus Descending, began psychoanalysis, working through his feelings of failure, his sometimes tempestuous relationship with Frank Merlo, the death of his father, and his dependencies on alcohol and drugs. As he began analysis, he wrote the play that became Suddenly Last Summer. It is considered by many to be his most autobiographical work.

Suddenly Last Summer, a mid-length play, was paired with Something Unspoken, a shorter play Williams had written five years earlier, and the combination was presented under the title Garden District, their shared New Orleans locale. Discouraged with the Broadway establishment, Williams decided to produce the plays at the Off-Broadway York Theatre, a venue associated with unknown and new playwrights, not established writers. The circumstances of Garden District’s production were “so humble,” writes critic Nicholas deJongh, “that it looked as if Williams was on the verge of losing his box-office appeal.” Although there was not a star in the cast, Garden District ran for 216 performances and was, likewise, a success with the critics.

Williams’s later work was not as commercially successful in this country as his earlier work had been. The Night of the Iguana was his last stage success for over ten years. His dramas in the 1960s struggled through short runs of 69, 29, or 25 performances. He began to premiere his work abroad or in smaller theatres in places like Key West, Florida, or Bar Harbor, Maine. In 1969 he suffered a nervous breakdown, and his brother committed him to the psychiatric unit of the Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, from September to December.

In 1972, Williams enjoyed his last commercial success with Small Craft Warnings, which opened Off-Broadway and played 201 performances. Williams continued to write, as he had done since his youth, creating 13 more plays before his death in 1983.