Page one of a letter in which Tennessee Williams asks his grandfather to send his application letter to the Rockefeller Foundation from Memphis, rather than St. Louis. Copyright ©2011 by the University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.

Page two of a letter in which Tennessee Williams asks his grandfather to send his application letter to the Rockefeller Foundation from Memphis, rather than St. Louis. Copyright ©2011 by the University of the South. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc. All rights reserved.

In 1938, Tennessee Williams entered Candles to the Sun in a competition sponsored by the Dramatists Guild in New York City. Williams wrote Candles to the Sun, a play about striking coal miners…

Tennessee Williams visiting the Ransom Center reading room, November 2, 1973. Photograph by Frank Armstrong.

Tennessee Williams will be inducted into the Poets’ Corner in The Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with celebrations beginning today. Previous inductees include Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams.

The Ransom Center holds materials that document the family, life, and work of the American playwright Tennessee Williams, born Thomas Lanier Williams. The collection contains numerous manuscript drafts, including those for the plays The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Also included are large amounts of newspaper clippings, correspondence,…