| 1911 | March 26 | Thomas Lanier Williams is born in Columbus, Mississippi. |
| 1927 | Williams gets his first taste of literary fame, placing third in a national essay contest sponsored by The Smart Set magazine. | |
| 1929 | He is admitted to the University of Missouri where he sees a production of Henrik Ibsen‘s Ghosts and decides to become a playwright. | |
| 1931 | His father forces him to withdraw from school and work in a St. Louis shoe factory where he meets a young man named Stanley Kowalski who will later resurface as a character in A Streetcar Named Desire. | |
| 1937 | Two of his plays, Candles to the Sun and The Fugitive Kind, are produced by Mummers of St. Louis. | |
| 1938 | Williams graduates from the University of Iowa with a bachelor of arts degree. | |
| 1939 | He moves to New Orleans and changes his name from “Tom” to “Tennessee” which was the state of his father’s birth. | |
| He receives a $1,000 Rockefeller Grant. | ||
| 1943 | A prefrontal lobotomy is performed on Williams’ sister Rose who had long suffered from mental illness. The operation, however, is a failure and leaves Rose incapacitated for the remainder of her life. Tennessee never forgives his parents for allowing the operation. | |
| 1944 | December 26 | The Glass Menagerie premieres at the Lyric Theatre in Chicago and enjoys a successful run. |
| 1945 | March 31 | The Glass Menagerie moves to the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway, earning Williams the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for best play of the season. |
| 1947 | Williams meets and falls in love with Frank Merlo. | |
| December 3 | A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway, earning Williams his first Pulitzer Prize and establishing him as one of the top dramatists of the American theatre. |