Click link below for complete story. The loneliness of which Williams speaks is not uncommon among writers and artists, I think. Something about the difference between reach and grasp, in a less romantic context than Tennyson wrote about. Recommended.
Tennessee Williams and Desire
When 28 year-old Tom Williams finally left his parents' Missouri home, he headed for New Orleans, for a new life as a writer, a newly-realized sexual identity as a homosexual, even a new first name: Tennessee. As he describes it in his Memoirs, the exchange of his mother's "monolithic puritanism" and the middle-class Midwest for the bars and bohemians of New Orleans was a late coming of age, as a person and a writer.
He lived and wrote among the artists and prostitutes and working poor of the French Quarter, in a neighbourhood where the streetcars had names. A decade later, Williams would turn a streetcar named "Desire" into one of the most famous plays in 20th century American theatre, and a Pulitzer Prize.
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