By 1937, the idea of Iowa as a center for creative writing had made its way to Tom Williams, an aspiring playwright and transfer student a year short of a degree. He enrolled at the University of Iowa, earning his B.A. in 1938, and soon thereafter picked up the moniker “Tennessee.”

In this image, Tennessee Williams is seen performing as a student in a stage production of Henry VI, Part 1 at the University of Iowa, on April 1938. Williams stands in the center of the picture, on the rock cliff.

Tennessee Williams’ plaque on the Iowa Avenue Literary Walk reads

We’re all of us sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life!

Tom’s first lodgings were at 225 North Linn, and on his first day in Iowa City, he wrote home: “I am very well satisfied with this place. I get both board and room here.” He said that the ‘excellent’ meals cost twenty-one dollars a month and the room ten dollars in advance. He was also delighted with the city – “very much like Columbia…”

 

In a letter he sent to his mother, Tennessee Williams announced the fact that he had moved again to a rooming house at 126 North Clinton Street and awaited her visit for his graduation:

…there is a big dinner for graduates at the [Iowa Memorial] Union. Guest are eighty-five cents if you want to attend that also. I have an extra bed, upper-deck in my room that Dakin could occupy free and the landlady says that she will have a vacant room after Friday morning that she would rent to you.

Williams also mentions his part in a play at the University of Iowa, and the amounts he owes in order to leave town:

I owe my landlady one dollar for the last week of the summer session […] I have a small part in the final play of the season, only two lines – as a page in Richard of Bordeaux.