Tennessee Williams Struggles

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Tennessee Williams is one of the greatest American playwrights, for about 50 years he set the stone for American theater. Just the way he writes, giving away little glimpses into his characters mind, and just left you wanting more, inspired and maddened the audience, critics and other playwrights. Most of his works make you have to take a step back and really use some thought to try to keep up with what is going on. I guess we can say he lets the mind wonder, which probably is the best talent a writer can have is probably. Some of his most famous works include; The Glass Menagerie (1944), A streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a hot Tin Roof (1955). These works stunned the audience because they explored things that most people didn’t really …show more content…
He grew to hate his father, Cornelius, who constantly made fun of his choice to be a writer. Cornelius had an alcohol problem, and probably had a mood disorder, which would frequently entitle him brutally criticizing Tennessee and calling him mean names like “a sissy”. His mother, Edwina, had problems to. She was paranoid her whole life, and normally nervous to the point of panic. At the age of 71 she was put into a psychiatric hospital with what could have been a late onset of schizophrenia-like psychosis. This would make her have hallucinations and bizarre paranoid delusions. For example, one time she thought there was a radioactive fallout in her hair from a rocket that had exploded outside her home, so she rubbed cold cream all over her face. Finally she died in a nursing home at 95 years old. He also had a little sister, Rose, who also revealed paranoid delusions, auditory hallucinations, and violent behavior since she was little. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and at the age 28 was sent to a state asylum. Later she had a frontal lobotomy, and spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital. Williams declared that the worst psychological trauma in his life was his sister’s …show more content…
Basically the letter said he had great potential and he would write great things on day, which made him feel more self-doubting and depressed, and started taking sleeping pills. He frequently wrote in a journal and that day he wrote about feeling helpless and frustrated he didn’t write for a while. Later he wrote about what he called “blue devils”, he said, “a little crazy blue devil has been with me all day. I wish I could shake him off and walk alone and free in the sunlight once more…I see some much beauty and feel so much that there is no reason why I should make myself miserable.(pp 169-174)” And then a few years later he again mentioned the “blue devils” harassed him and made him downgrade
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