Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Williams's Pulitzer Prize-winning play has captured both stage and film audiences since its debut in 1954. One of his best-loved and most famous plays, it exposes the lies plaguing the family of a wealthy Southern planter of humble origins.

Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams) was born in Columbus, Mississippi on March 26, 1914, and lived there until he was twelve, when his family moved to St. Louis. His education at the University of Missouri (1931-33) was interrupted for financial reasons, but he later (1938) received his B.A. from the University of Iowa. Tennessee Williams started writing and publishing poetry when very young, while simultaneously holding a variety of jobs-starting with a clerical position in the shoe company that also employed his father. His first real recognition came in 1940 when he received a Rockefeller fellowship and his first play, Battle of Angels, was produced by the Theatre Guild in Boston. His first financial break, which enabled him to give full attention to his writing, came with an offer from MGM, which he accepted, abandoning his job as a movie usher. After six months of work in Hollywood, he devoted his time to writing The Glass Menagerie, the initial success which established him as one of the leading American playwrights. Since that time, his plays have been made into movies, produced on TV, turned into operas and ballets-A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Night of the Iguana, Cut on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie, to name just a few. In May of 1969 Tennessee Williams was awarded the Gold Medal for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died on February 25, 1983. He is the author of the following works: Baby Doll, Battle of Angels, Camino Real, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics' Award). Dragon Country (short plays, including In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel), The Eccentricities of a Nightingale, Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (stories), The Glass Menagerie, Hard Candy (stories), In the Winter of Cities (poems), Kingdom of Earth (The Seven Descents of Myrtle), The Knightly Quest (stories), Memoirs (autobiography), The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, Moise and the World of Reason (novel), The Night of the Iguana (winner of the Drama Critics' Award), One Arm and Other Stories, Orpheus Descending, Out Cry, Period of Adjustment, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (novel), The Rose Tattoo, Small Craft Warnings, A Streetcar Named Desire (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and Drama Critics' Award), Suddenly Last Summer, Summer and Smoke, Sweet Bird of Youth, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, The Two-Character Play, Vieux Carre, and Clothes for a Summer Hotel.