LitCity

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.

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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!

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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..."

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  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.

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