It was the first of a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), and The Night of the Iguana (1961).

His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman.

[7] As a young child, Williams nearly died from a case of diphtheria that left him frail and virtually confined to his house during a year of recuperation.

His mother's continual search for a more appropriate home, as well as his father's heavy drinking and loudly turbulent behavior, caused them to move numerous times around St. Louis.

A year later, his short story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" was published (as by "Thomas Lanier Williams") in the August 1928 issue of the magazine Weird Tales.

[14] These early publications did not lead to any significant recognition or appreciation of Williams's talent, and he would struggle for more than a decade to establish his writing career.

[16] As recognition for Beauty, a play about rebellion against religious upbringing, he became the first freshman to receive honorable mention in a writing competition.

After he failed a military training course in his junior year, his father pulled him out of school and put him to work at the International Shoe Company factory.

His mother recalled his intensity: Tom would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house.

Williams lived for a time in New Orleans' French Quarter, including 722 Toulouse Street, the setting of his 1977 play Vieux Carré.

Williams wrote, "Only some radical change can divert the downward course of my spirit, some startling new place or people to arrest the drift, the drag.

"[37] Between 1948 and 1959 Williams had seven of his plays produced on Broadway: Summer and Smoke (1948), The Rose Tattoo (1951), Camino Real (1953), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Orpheus Descending (1957), Garden District (1958), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959).

Williams's work reached wider audiences in the early 1950s when The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire were adapted into motion pictures.

Later plays also adapted for the screen included Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Rose Tattoo, Orpheus Descending, The Night of the Iguana, Sweet Bird of Youth, and Summer and Smoke.

Although he continued to write every day, the quality of his work suffered from his increasing alcohol and drug consumption, as well as occasional poor choices of collaborators.[who?

Consumed by depression over the loss, and in and out of treatment facilities while under the control of his mother and brother Dakin, Williams spiraled downward.

In the years following Merlo's death, Williams descended into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use, which resulted in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities.

As Williams grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing his sexual appeal to younger gay men.

Chief Medical Examiner of New York City Elliot M. Gross reported that Williams had choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of the type used on bottles of nasal spray or eye solution.

[51] The report was later corrected on August 14, 1983, to state that Williams had been using the plastic cap found in his mouth to ingest barbiturates[52] and had actually died from a toxic level of Seconal.

[53] He wrote in his will in 1972:[54] I, Thomas Lanier (Tennessee) Williams, being in sound mind upon this subject, and having declared this wish repeatedly to my close friends-do hereby state my desire to be buried at sea.

I wish to be sewn up in a canvas sack and dropped overboard, as stated above, as close as possible to where Hart Crane was given by himself to the great mother of life which is the sea: the Caribbean, specifically, if that fits the geography of his death.

Rose Williams, Tennessee's sister, died in 1996 after many years in a mental institution in New York state; the university subsequently received about $7 million, which supports a creative writing program.

[56] From February 1 to July 21, 2011, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the home of Williams's archive, exhibited 250 of his personal items.

Performers and artists who took part in his induction included Vanessa Redgrave, playwright John Guare, Eli Wallach, Sylvia Miles, Gregory Mosher, and Ben (Griessmeyer) Berry.

At the time of his death, Williams had been working on a final play, In Masks Outrageous and Austere,[60] which attempted to reconcile certain forces and facts of his own life.

[61] The play received its world premiere in New York City in April 2012, directed by David Schweizer and starring Shirley Knight as Babe.

"[69][70][71] In 2015, The Tennessee Williams Theatre Company of New Orleans was founded by Co-Artistic Directors Nick Shackleford and Augustin J Correro.

These two plays later were adapted as highly successful films by noted directors Elia Kazan (Streetcar), with whom Williams developed a very close artistic relationship, and Richard Brooks (Cat).

Although The Flowering Peach by Clifford Odets was the preferred choice of the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1955, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof was at first considered the weakest of the five shortlisted nominees, Joseph Pulitzer Jr., chairman of the Board, had seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and thought it worthy of the drama prize.