# The Elysee Hotel *A Biography of Tennessee Williams* — Legendary Biographies No. 227 - **Subject:** Thomas Lanier Williams III (Tennessee Williams) - **Written by:** Eleanor Whitlock - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 182 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 182 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-152-9) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Edmund Hartley (ISBN 979-8-90623-622-7) - **Content notes:** addiction; homophobia Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/227-the-elysee-hotel.html ## About this book February 25, 1983, the Hotel Elysée on East 54th Street in Manhattan. Thomas Lanier Williams III, seventy-one, the playwright known as Tennessee, is found dead in his suite by his secretary John Uecker. The cause of death is recorded as asphyxiation from the cap of a Seconal bottle. He had been in physical decline for years and had been writing in his journal of his fear that he would die alone in a hotel room. Eleanor Whitlock's biography opens earlier — in Columbus, Mississippi, where Thomas was born in 1911, the second child of a travelling shoe salesman named Cornelius Williams and a minister's daughter named Edwina Dakin — and follows the arc through the long St. Louis Catholic and Episcopal childhood, the University of Missouri and Washington University and University of Iowa years, the long New Orleans bohemian 1939-1940 winter that gave the writer his pen-name, the 1944 The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, the 1947 A Streetcar Named Desire and the long Elia Kazan productions, the 1955 Pulitzer-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the long Frank Merlo partnership of 1948-1963 and Merlo's lung-cancer death, the long post-1963 critical-and-commercial decline, the long barbiturate-and-cocaine years of the late 1960s and 1970s, the 1979 Clothes for a Summer Hotel Broadway opening, and the February 1983 hotel room. What emerges is a portrait of the Columbus, Mississippi-born American playwright whose Pulitzer-winning Streetcar and Cat established the post-war American theatre — and whose long late-career decline the same theatre took twenty years to bring itself to write about with the seriousness his early work had earned him. ## Contents 1. The Rectory and the Diphtheria Year 2. Westminster Place and Cornelius 3. Mizzou and the Warehouse 4. Iowa, New Orleans, the Naming 5. Provincetown, Boston, Kip 6. The Lobotomy 7. The Glass Menagerie 8. Pancho, Hart Crane, the Streetcar 9. Frank Merlo, Key West, the Mad House 10. Orpheus, Suddenly Last Summer, the Garden District 11. Frank's Death and the Beginning of the Stoned Age 12. Tokyo, Yukio, the Critical Wilderness 13. Barnes, the Baptism, the Audrey Wood Break 14. Robert Carroll, Memoirs, the Late Companion 15. Edwina, Clothes, Something Cloudy, Something Clear 16. The Sunset Suite, the Smith Corona, the Last Weeks 17. The Discovery, 25 February 1983 18. Calvary, Stony Lodge, the Coda ## Questions **Who is The Elysee Hotel about?** Thomas Lanier Williams III (Tennessee Williams). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Elysee Hotel — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,347 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 60,000 words, 18 chapters, 182 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: addiction; homophobia. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Eleanor Whitlock is a New York-based biographer who writes about American women of letters and their reckonings with celebrity. Her research focuses on the private spaces and public moments that shape literary history, as seen in her biographies of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, both of which were shortlisted for national biography prizes. Through titles like Black Holes, The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk, and The Biafra Broadcasts, she examines the intersection of archival history and personal narrative. Her other publications include The Jamaican Renaissance, The Fitzroy Road Kitchen, The Plaza Hotel Party, The Owl Farm, and The Elysee Hotel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends her spare time restoring vintage typewriters and walking in Prospect Park.