Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) (Playwright of A Streetcar Named Desire) was born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, MS.  He studied in Missouri and visited Memphis, but he felt at home in New Orleans, where he sets our play in 1947.  Two years earlier, he had written The Glass Menagerie.  He rapidly became one of the towering playwrights in America – and remains so.  A Streetcar Named Desire was only the second play in history to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.  As a sickly boy, Tom spent some early years in Clarksdale, MS, with his mother and his sister Rose.  When his traveling salesman father moved the family to St. Louis, the children were ill-prepared for the cultural shock from rural to metropolitan.  Rose retreated into her imagination, and Tom, whose father named him a “sissy,” loathed the city.  His relationships with his mother and sister remain thematic throughout his career.  His plays include Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth, and The Night of the Iguana.   Tom’s poetic vision for American theatre was a defense of, as he said, “elegance, a love of the beautiful, a romantic attitude toward life” and “a violent protest against those things that defeat it.”