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His Life in a Play. The play that best proves it is The Glass Menagerie. In it Williams held a mirror up to memory and caught upon it the breath of three lives: his mother's, his sister's and his own. In a lower-middle-class apartment in a Mid western city, Amanda Wingfield ("an exact portrait of my mother," says Williams) tries to cope with a peevish present by chattering of a fancied past. The son Tom (Williams) suffocates in a shoe factory and goes to movies to daydream of escape. The daughter Laura (Williams' sister Rose) has a mind and a personality as fragile as the little glass animals that deck her room. But the mother dragoons Tom into bringing home a marriageable "gentleman caller" for Laura. When the caller turns out to be engaged, and unintentionally breaks the pet unicorn in Laura's menagerie, the girl's future can be read in the fractured glass. At play's end, Tom lunges free of family, but for the playwright-to-be the future would always be trapped in the past.
The past, in Williams' real life, starts with a genealogical treeful of romantics, adventurers and notables: Poet Sidney Lanier, some Tennessee Indian fighters, an early U.S. Senator, and, way back, a brother of St. Francis Xavier. More prosaically, his father was a salesman for International Shoe Co. "C.C." (for Cornelius Coffin) Williams was a gruff, aggressive man with a booming voice who was happiest, says Tennessee, "playing poker with men and drinking." His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, was petite, vivacious, genteel and prim; she nourished rather illusory memories of a grand and gracious Southern past, of going to dances in Natchez and Vicksburg "on those big, beautiful plantations."
"He Practically Died." C.C. was forever on the road with his shoe line, and Edwina Williams lived with her father, a patrician Episcopal preacher who restlessly changed parishes about every two years. Thomas Lanier Williams was born in 1911 in his grandfather's rectory in Columbus, Miss. He and his older sister Rose absorbed their mother's lofty sense of status as the daughter of a clergyman in Delta country. Tom loved to tag along after the Rev. Mr. Dakin on parish calls and listen to the conversations. "Tom always was a little pitcher with big ears, and I think he still is," says Mrs. Williams. Years later, until the old man died at 98, Williams kept his grandfather with him six months a year, took him to Key West and abroad (and modeled Iguana's Nonno on him). "My grandfather was not the most masculine sort of man," says Williams. "He was not effeminate, but there was nothing that delighted him more than to receive a bottle of cologne or silk handkerchiefs as gifts."
At the age of five, Tom caught diphtheria. "He practically died,"