Work: He started working as a clerk in a shoe factory, and continued writing short stories in his spare time. However, he fell ill and returned to his grandparents who had retired to Memphis, Tennessee. His mother had his sister Rose, institutionalised and ordered her to undergo a lobotomy in 1937. Tennessee Williams did not forgive his mother for this. These events inspired his play Suddenly Last Summer, (1958) later to be made into a wonderful camp film with Elizabeth Taylor, Katherine Hepburn and Montgomer Clift..
. It was during 1938 at University that he acquired the first name Tennessee. The first work to appear under the name Tennessee Williams was the short story "The Field of Blue Children" which was published in the magazine Story in 1939. He took up a variety of jobs including poet-waiter at a Greenwich Village restaurant, and a cinema usher. His four one-act plays, American Blues, won a Theatre Guild award in 1939.
In 1940 he received a Rockefeller Fellowship for his first play, Battle of Angels, (published in 1945). Nevertheless the play was a failure when it opened in Boston and he later re-wrote it as Orpheus Descending, (1957). In 1943 he signed a six-month contract with MGM, but this was cancelled when he submitted a script with the title Gentleman Caller which would later open on Broadway as The Glass Menagerie, (written in 1944 and published in 1945), and in 1945, earned him the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award. In 1948 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for A Streetcar Named Desire.
In 1955 Tennessee Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics Award for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The play had started life as a short story Three Players of a Summer Game, (1951), which he reworked with extra characters in 1954. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in New York on 24th. March, 1955 at the Morosco Theatre and ran for 694 performances. It received critical acclaim in New York, but when it opened in London on 20th. January, 1958, in a production directed by Peter Hall it received poor reviews. A film followed in 1958, and although it was a commercial success (the fifth-largest grossing film in MGM's history) it did not seem to capture all the strengths of Tennessee Williams's writing. He said: 'It seemed like a prostitution or a corruption. Liz Taylor is no actress. She was a personality ... She was directed by Richard Brooks who's a wonderful director except that at the end he cheats on the material, sweetens it up and makes it all hunky-dory.' In 1969 he won the Gold Medal for Literature from both the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.