Finding Aid for Tennessee Williams collection of noncommercial recordings, 1948.

• Descriptive Summary
• Biographical Note
• Scope and Content Note
• Organization
• Collection Listing

Access

Collection is open to the public. Access to original items is restricted. Advance notification required for use.

Publication Rights

For permission to publish, contact the Curator, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound.

Perferred Citation

Tennessee Williams Collection, *L(Special) 89.35, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi, was an American playwright, poet, and novelist. Being from an old Tennessee family, he adopted his first name while in New Orleans in 1939. After graduating from the State University of Iowa in 1938, he traveled around the country while working at odd jobs and writing short plays and getting occasional productions in community theaters. He worked briefly as a scriptwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1943.

He achieved sudden success with the New York production of The Glass Menagerie (1945). His subsequent success came with A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

Although Williams' life was marked by personal disarray, mental stress, and drug addiction, he enjoyed long-term relationships with male companions and continued to be productive. In 1968 he converted to Catholicism.

His later plays include Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955, Pulitzer Prize), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and Night of the Iguana (1961).

He also published two novels and several poems. Many of his plays were made into successful movies, but his later works were not well received and he became disaffected from the New York professional theater. He died by choking on the cap of a bottle of pills.

Eleven of the thirteen recordings in the collection were made by Williams in 1948 at a New Orleans carnival booth facility. These recordings primarily feature Williams reading his poems, including selections from In the Winter of Cities. Williams also participates in apparently impromptu comic sketches with friends. The remaining two recordings are songs by composer Ray Cook with texts from In the Winter of Cities, here performed by tenor and piano. These two recordings were given to Williams by Ray Cook.

The collection is organized alphabetically.