Provincetown History Snippets: Why Was Tennessee Williams in Ptown?

Tennessee Williams spent four summer seasons in Provincetown (1940, 1941, 1944, and 1947) where he wrote plays, short stories, and glowing poetry. He experienced a lot of drama offstage as well as on, falling in love, having his heart broken, surviving a purported attempt on his life, and experiencing both wealth and poverty. He took conga lessons, swam, posed, and wrote; there’s a story that part of The Glass Menagerie was written at the Little Bar at the Atlantic House. Whether or not the venue of that story is true, Williams did work on a plethora of plays here, including The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Summer and Smoke, The Night of the Iguana and Suddenly Last Summer, and an abandoned autobiographical play set in Provincetown called The Parade.

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