Howard Koslow (American, 1924 - 2016) "Tennessee Williams" Signed lower right. Original oil painting on Cold Press Illustration Board.

Provenance: Collection of James A. Helzer (1946-2008), Founder of Unicover Corporation.

This painting is the original painting which appeared on the Fleetwood First Day Cover of the Literary Arts Series 32c Tennessee Williams stamp issued October 13, 1995.

Thomas Lanier Williams was born on March 26, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. During the Great Depression, he worked at a St. Louis shoe factory while learning to write plays under the name of Tennessee Williams. Some of his work was performed by little theatre groups, which encouraged him to study dramatic writing at the University of Iowa. In the early 1940s, Williams worked in Hollywood as an usher and scriptwriter before attaining success with The Glass Menagerie, a play about a shy crippled girl who lives in a fantasy world with her collection of glass animals. Williams' next major play, A Streetcar Named Desire, is a captivating study of Blanche Du Bois, whose genteel Southern pretensions are shattered by harsh reality in the form of her crude brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. This moving drama won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947 and its success was followed by The Rose Tatoo in 1950. Williams' 1955 play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, also won a Pulitzer Prize and was made into a successful movie. Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana were plays written by Williams and made into popular movies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After that, Williams suffered from ill health caused by an addiction to alcohol and sleeping pills that led, in 1969, to a severe mental and physical breakdown. Perhaps because of this, the plays he penned during the 1970s and early 1980s didn't have quite the poignancy of his earlier works. Williams died in New York City in 1983.

Image Size: 14 x 12 in.
Overall Size: 20 x 18 in.
Unframed.
(B15165)

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