One of America's most famous playwrights. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Columbus, Mississippi. His mother was an aggressive woman, obsessed by her fantasies of genteel Southern living. His father, a traveling salesman for a large shoe manufacturer, was at turns distant and abusive. More than a half century has passed since critics and theater-goers recognized Williams as an important American playwright. Williams's repertoire includes some 30 full-length plays, numerous short plays, two volumes of poetry, and five volumes of essays and short stories. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955, and was the first playwright to receive, in 1947, the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the Donaldson Award, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in the same year. By 1945 he had completed and opened on Broadway The Glass Menagerie, his best-known play. In the course of his career, Williams accumulated four New York Drama Critics Awards; three Donaldson Awards; a Tony Award for his 1951 screenplay, The Rose Tattoo; a New York Film Critics Award for the 1953 film screenplay, A Streetcar Named Desire; the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (1965); a Medal of Honor from the National Arts Club (1975); the Commonwealth Award (1981); and an honorary doctorate from Harvard University (1982). He was honored by President Carter at Kennedy Center in 1979, and named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, in 1981. By 1955 his reputation was firmly established; that year's Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ran for 694 performances. Some years after their first Broadway runs, four of his plays were revived successfully there: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1974), Summer and Smoke (September, 1975), Sweet Bird of Youth (October, 1975), and The Glass Menagerie (December, 1975). On the day of Williams's death, the New York evening papers issued an impressive list of famous actors who have performed in his plays; these include Jessica Tandy, Marlon Brando, Geraldine Page, Paul Newman, Maureen Stapleton, Eli Wallach, Tallulah Bankhead, Burl Ives, Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Bette Davis. The conflicts between sexuality, society, and Christianity, so much a part of Williams's drama, played themselves out in his life as well. Having spent almost all of his life as a wanderer, Williams died on February 23, 1983.