Thomas Lanier Williams III (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), known by his pen name Tennessee Williams, was an American playwright and screenwriter.
Along with contemporaries Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, he is considered among the three foremost playwrights of 20th-century American drama.
At age 33, after years of obscurity, Williams suddenly became famous with the success of The Glass Menagerie (1944) in New York City.
He introduced "plastic theatre" in this play and it closely reflected his own unhappy family background.
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).
With his later work, Williams attempted a new style that did not appeal as widely to audiences.
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.
After some early attempts at relationships with women, by the late 1930s, Williams began exploring his homosexuality.
In New York City, he joined a gay social circle that included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920–2010) and Windham's then-boyfriend Fred Melton.
In the summer of 1940, Williams initiated a relationship with Kip Kiernan (1918–1944), a young dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
When Kiernan left him to marry a woman, Williams was distraught. Kiernan's death four years later at age 26 was another heavy blow.
On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodríguez y González, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage.
Rodríguez was prone to jealous rages and excessive drinking, and their relationship was tempestuous.
In February 1946, Rodríguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment.
They lived and traveled together until late 1947, when Williams ended the relationship. Rodríguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s.
Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a young man named "Rafaello" in Williams' Memoirs.
He provided financial assistance to the younger man for several years afterward. Williams drew from this for his first novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.
When he returned to New York City that spring, Williams met and fell in love with Frank Merlo (1921–1963).
An occasional actor of Sicilian ancestry, he had served in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
This was the enduring romantic relationship of Williams' life, and it lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it.
Merlo, who had become Williams' personal secretary, took on most of the details of their domestic life.
He provided a period of happiness and stability, acting as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression.
Williams feared that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity.
His years with Merlo, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida were Williams's happiest and most productive.
Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer.
Williams returned to him and cared for him until his death on September 20, 1963.
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.
He submitted to injections by Dr. Max Jacobson, known popularly as Dr. Feelgood, who used increasing amounts of amphetamines to overcome his depression.
Jacobson combined these with prescriptions for the sedative Seconal to relieve his insomnia.
During this time, influenced by his brother, a Roman Catholic convert, Williams joined the Catholic Church, though he later claimed that he never took his conversion seriously.
He was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.
As Williams grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing his sexual appeal to younger gay men.
In the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, Williams had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam War veteran and aspiring writer in his 20s.
Williams had deep affection for Carroll and respect for what he saw as the younger man's talents.
Along with Williams's sister Rose, Carroll was one of the two people who received a bequest in Williams's will.
Williams described Carroll's behavior as a combination of "sweetness" and "beastliness".
Because Carroll had a drug problem, as did Williams, friends including Maria Britneva saw the relationship as destructive.
Williams wrote that Carroll played on his "acute loneliness" as an aging gay man.
When the two men broke up in 1979, Williams called Carroll a "twerp", but they remained friends until Williams died four years later.
On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead at age 71 in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York City.
Chief Medical Examiner of New York City Elliot M. Gross reported that Williams had choked to death from inhaling the plastic cap of a bottle of the type used on bottles of nasal spray or eye solution.
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 and had actually died from a toxic level of Secona