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Tennessee Williams, 71, the leading playwright of his generation whose work focused on human conflicts in his beloved South, was found dead today at a Manhattan hotel.
Police said Williams, who made his home in Key West, Fla., and had been in failing health recently, apparently died of natural causes. An autopsy was ordered.
His body was found at 10:30 a.m. in his room at the Elysee Hotel by his secretary, John Ucker. A police spokesman said an Emergency Medical Service team declared Williams dead at 11:10 a.m.
Williams, who won Pulitzer prizes for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "A Streetcar Named Desire," checked into the Elysee a week ago, Sy Pinto, the manager at the hotel just off Fifth Avenue, said.
Pinto said Williams, a regular guest at the hotel for the last 15 years, was found in his night clothes slumped over the side of his bed.
Williams was acclaimed as the most successful American playwright of his generation but it appeared for many years he would be a failure.
After a series of heartbreaking setbacks, Williams found fame and fortune on Broadway. He won two Pulitzer Prizes, four Drama Critics Circle Awards and a Kennedy Center Honor.
Williams was born on March 26, 1911, in an Episcopal rectory in Columbus, Miss. His father, Cornelius Coffin Williams, was the rector of the church. It was as a clergyman that the rector christened his son Thomas Lanier Williams.
At the age of 26, Williams chose the name Tennessee, probably because he spent the two happiest years of his life in Nashville.
Williams had a younger brother, Dakin, and a sister, Rose, who was two years older. Tennessee and Rose became inseparable companions and when she became hospitalized with schizophrenia at the age of 28, he became grief- stricken. It was believed that this strong feeling of loss made Williams fashion Rose as the model for the heroine in his first major play, "The Glass Menagerie."
Early in his childhood, Williams survived diphtheria, but lost a year's schooling, causing him to become introspective. He spent most of his out-of- school time reading everything he could find.
"I discovered writing as an escape from a world of reality in which I felt acutely uncomfortable," Williams once said. "It became my retreat, my cave, my refuge."
Williams was only 14 when he won his first writing award, $25 from Smart Set magazine for an essay. A movie theater in St. Louis gave him $10 for the best review of the movie, "Stella Dallas."
Although early signs indicated Williams had begun a successful career, his second play, "The Magic Tower," was a turkey. There were other setbacks, too.
After receiving his bachelor's degree from Iowa in 1938 at the age of 27, Williams moved around the country doing odd jobs - to St. Louis, Chicago, New Orleans and various cities in California.
While in California, Williams found out he had won a playwriting contest and its cash prize of $100. The contest award also brought him an association with Audrey Wood, an author's representative. She sold some of his unpublished poems and helped him get a Rockefeller Fellowship, which was worth $1,000 and a move to New York City.
In 1944, Williams received another unexpected windfall of $1,000 from the National Institute of Arts and Letters "in recognition of his dramatic works which reveal a poetic imagination and a gift for characterization that are rare in the contemporary." That was the year when Williams wrote "The Glass Menagerie."
His real success began when "The Glass Menagerie" opened in Chicago on Christmas Eve of 1944 to critical acclaim. It opened in New York on March 31, 1945, and received rave reviews. The most recent revival of "The Glass Menagerie" was staged in New York in November 1980, the same year that Williams' "Clothes for a Summer Hotel," based on the later years in the marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, opened on Broadway but failed to reach the fame of his better plays.
His next play, "A Streetcar Named Desire," was a smashing box-office success after it opened in New York in December 1947. "Streetcar" won the Pulitzer Prize, another Drama Critics Circle award, and the Donaldson Award.
A string of successes and near-successes followed. "Summer and Smoke" was a big hit in 1948. "The Rose Tattoo" in 1950 pleased the critics. "Camino Real" in 1952 got mixed reviews but later it received recognition as a major work. "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" won Williams a second Pulitzer Prize and a third Drama Critics Circle Award in 1954. Philadelphia Daily News, 25 February 1983.²

In 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, sharing it with Elinor Ostrom.¹