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Williams was known for skipping classes and missing exams during college purely because he would forget about them.
He was born Thomas Lanier Williams III but changed his name to Tennessee at the age of 28. Speculation has surrounded the motive for this change with various proposals such as him wanting to break from his past, or, conversely, that he wanted to pay tribute to his ancestors that lived in the state of Tennessee.
His older sister had schizophrenia, and it has been recorded that he would be left feeling ill after visiting her as she was “screaming incoherently like a wild animal”.
He spoke his words out loud as he was writing them.
One two occasions before becoming a noted playwright, Williams pawned his typewriter in order to buy food.
He once said “My greatest affliction… is perhaps the major theme in my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to after me all of my days and nights.”
Williams once referred to his fame and fortune as the “catastrophe of success.”
When questioned on children in his latter years, he said, “I’m very glad I didn’t have any children. There have been to many instances of extreme eccentricity and even lunacy in my family for me to want to have children. I think it’s fortunate I never did.”
Williams became aware of his homosexuality upon the realisation that he was attracted to the same boy as his sister during his adolescent years.
He once said, “I don’t believe in individual guilt. I don’t think people are responsible for what they do. We are products of circumstances that determine what we do. That’s why I think capital punishment is an outrage.”
He began writing at the age of 12.
When questioned on advice to younger playwrights he said, “Don’t bore the audience! I mean if you have to resort to arbitrary killing on stage, or pointless gunfire, at least it’ll catch their attention and keep them awake. Just keep the thing going any way you can.”
Another boy who couldn’t tolerate his effeminate personality often physically abused Williams.
Williams once wrote of his social life as “Haggard, tired, jittery, fretful, bored – that is what lack of reciprocal love does to a man. Let us hope it spurs his creative impulse – there should be some compensation for this hell of loneliness.”
He once wrote in his diary “I hate streets with demure or sedate little trees and the awful screech of trolley wheels and polite, constrained city voices. I want hills and valleys and lakes all around me! I want to lie dreaming and naked in the sun! I want to be free and have freedom all around me!”
Williams found inspiration and refuge in black coffee, sleeping pills and alcohol.
His father considered him weak, effeminate and cowardly.
Williams considered himself as “a footless bird that must die suspended in flight”
Both Williams and his father were alcoholics.
He suffered emotionally by oscillating highs and lows, and as a result pondered on the notion that he might also have schizophrenia like his sister.
Image Credits: biography.com
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