Becoming Tennessee

A portrait of the playwright as a young artist.

- By Casey Cep

If you ever have to lie about your age, try to do it with as much creativity and conviction as Tennessee Williams. When he was nearly twenty-eight, the playwright submitted a handful of one-act plays to a contest for writers under twenty-five. Worried that his deception would be discovered, he changed his name and mailed the submission not from St. Louis, where he lived, but from Memphis, using his grandparents' home there as the return address. Born Thomas Lanier Williams III in Mississippi, he first considered calling himself Valentine Sevier, after an ancestor on his father's side whose brother was the first governor of Tennessee. But he decided to instead keep his last name and change only his first.

"Mr. "Tennessee' Williams got a telegram last night," he wrote to his mother a few months later, in March, 1939, letting her know that he'd won the contest, receiving a hundred-dollar prize from the Group Theatre, in New York City. "Do not spread this around till the checque has arrived, as some of my friends'... might feel morally obliged to inform the Group that I am over 25."