“Do not spread this around till the checque has arrived, as some of my ‘friends’ . . . ‘Tennessee’ Williams got a telegram last night,” he wrote to his mother a few months later, in March, 1939, letting her know that he’d won the contest, receiving a hundred-dollar prize from the Group Theatre, in New York City. But he decided to instead keep his last name and change only his first. Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Mississippi, he first considered calling himself Valentine Sevier, after an ancestor on his father’s side whose brother was the first governor of Tennessee. Worried that his deception would be discovered, he changed his name and mailed the submission not from St. Louis, where he lived, but from Memphis, using his grandparents’ home there as the return address. When he was nearly twenty-eight, the playwright submitted a handful of one-act plays to a contest for writers under twenty-five. If you ever have to lie about your age, try to do it with as much creativity and conviction as Tennessee Williams.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |