Tennessee Williams Trivia
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60 free Tennessee Williams trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Tennessee Williams turned his own troubled family into some of the greatest plays in American theatre, and this trivia quiz covers all of it. The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke, The Rose Tattoo, Camino Real, Orpheus Descending, Suddenly Last Summer, Sweet Bird of Youth and The Night of the Iguana are all here, with questions on characters, settings, first productions, Pulitzer Prizes and the film versions with Vivien Leigh, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Anna Magnani. The life questions are just as rich: the Mississippi birth and St. Louis shoe factory, the sister whose lobotomy haunted him, the pen name he took around 1939, the Rockefeller grant, the New Orleans apartment near the Desire streetcar line, the 14 years with Frank Merlo, the Dr. Feelgood injections and the strange death at the Hotel Elysée. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on Williams and his individual plays and films, and each question links to its source. Try our Arthur Miller and Broadway quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Tennessee Williams's real first name?
Thomas
Thomas Lanier Williams III was Tom to his family, and he gave that name to the narrator of The Glass Menagerie, the restless son who stands in for Williams himself.
Q 02Despite his pen name, the playwright Tennessee Williams was born in which state?
Mississippi
Mississippi is where he was born and spent his first years, in his grandparents' home; Tennessee was his father's side of the family, and the state whose name he borrowed when he renamed himself as a young writer.
Q 03What was the job of Tennessee Williams's father during the playwright's early childhood?
Traveling shoe salesman
Traveling shoe salesman Cornelius Williams was so rarely home, and drank so heavily, that his wife and children spent the playwright's first years living with her parents.
Q 04Which childhood illness nearly killed Tennessee Williams and kept him housebound through a long recovery?
Diphtheria
Diphtheria left the once-sturdy boy frail and kept him indoors, where his mother and grandparents read to him by the hour; he came out of it bookish and delicate, to his father's open scorn.
Q 05When Tennessee Williams was a boy, his family left the South for which city?
St. Louis
St. Louis ended a small-town childhood he remembered as happy; he hated the city, turned inward and began to write there, and later set The Glass Menagerie in one of its dingy apartments.
Q 06Williams's lurid revenge story "The Vengeance of Nitocris" ran in which pulp magazine when he was 17?
Weird Tales
Weird Tales printed it in August 1928: an Egyptian queen lures her brother's killers to a banquet in an underground vault, then pulls a lever and lets the Nile drown them.
Q 07Why is Williams's father said to have pulled him out of university?
He failed a military training course
He failed a military training course, the ROTC, in the usual telling, and was put to work as a clerk; Williams wrote through the nights until he collapsed in 1935.
Q 08Where did Williams finally graduate with a B.A. in English in 1938?
The University of Iowa
The University of Iowa: an amateur troupe had staged his early plays, and its director urged him to go there to study playwriting. He finished the degree at 27.
Q 09Which foundation gave the struggling young Williams a grant after his one-act plays won a Group Theatre prize?
The Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation money was no rescue: he went on working odd jobs, from theatre usher to Hollywood scriptwriter, until The Glass Menagerie made his name.
Q 10Which late Williams play is set at 722 Toulouse Street, the rooming house where he once rented an attic?
Vieux Carré
Vieux Carré: he lived in the attic at 27, and the house he called a "poetic evocation of all the cheap rooming houses of the world" now belongs to the museum around the corner.
Q 11The Glass Menagerie opened in which city in December 1944, three months before it reached Broadway?
Chicago
Chicago: bad weather kept early audiences away and the producers considered closing, until critics Claudia Cassidy and Ashton Stevens campaigned for it and built the houses that carried it to Broadway.
Q 12Which actress returned from years of near-retirement to play Amanda Wingfield in the original Glass Menagerie?
Laurette Taylor
Laurette Taylor had acted only occasionally since her husband's death in 1928. Her Amanda won special acclaim, and she died in December 1946, four months after the Broadway run closed.
Q 13In The Glass Menagerie, what nickname did Jim give Laura in high school?
Blue Roses
Q 21Whose threat to condemn the finished 1951 film of Streetcar led Warner Bros. to cut it?
The Legion of Decency
The Legion of Decency, a Catholic film-rating body, was about to condemn it, so the studio trimmed a few minutes of film. The footage was restored in 1993.
Q 22Which pair led the 1992 Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire?
Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange
Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange led the revival, and both returned to their roles when it was filmed for television in 1995.
Q 23Which star played Maggie "the Cat" opposite Paul Newman in the 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Elizabeth Taylor
Blue Roses is what Jim heard when Laura said she had been ill with pleurosis. The name suits her: a flower not found in nature, for the shy girl who prizes a glass unicorn.
Q 14What was the working title of The Glass Menagerie while Williams was turning his MGM screenplay into a play?
The Gentleman Caller
The Gentleman Caller began as a screenplay he wrote on MGM's payroll in 1943. Reworked for the stage, it made his name, and it was a rival studio, Warner Bros., that filmed it in 1950.
Q 15In A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche rides Desire, changes to Cemeteries and gets off where?
Elysian Fields Avenue
Elysian Fields Avenue: the names are real, and Williams lined them up so that Blanche passes from Desire through Cemeteries to a shabby street that bears the name of Greek myth's paradise for the blessed dead.
Q 16From which town does Blanche DuBois travel in A Streetcar Named Desire?
Laurel
Laurel: Blanche says she is on leave from teaching English there, but she was dismissed over an affair with a 17-year-old student and turned out of the Hotel Flamingo.
Q 17What is the name of the DuBois family plantation lost before A Streetcar Named Desire begins?
Belle Reve
Belle Reve went to the bank on a foreclosed mortgage, not into Blanche's pocket as her brother-in-law suspects when he cites the Napoleonic Code. She hands him the papers to prove it.
Q 18Vivien Leigh played Blanche DuBois on screen, but who created the role on Broadway in 1947?
Jessica Tandy
Jessica Tandy won a Tony for her Blanche, but Hollywood insisted on a film star and passed her over for the 1951 movie, even as her three Broadway co-stars kept their roles.
Q 19Which Streetcar character carries the name of a young man Williams met while working in a factory?
Stanley Kowalski
Stanley Kowalski was a young man he met in the job his father forced on him, work that left him miserable. Years later the name went to Blanche's brutish brother-in-law.
Q 20The 1951 film of A Streetcar Named Desire won three acting Oscars, but which of its nominated stars lost?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando lost while Vivien Leigh, Karl Malden and Kim Hunter all won. It was the first of four straight Best Actor nominations for him, and the fourth, for On the Waterfront, brought the Oscar.
Elizabeth Taylor lost her husband, producer Mike Todd, in a plane crash in March 1958, days after filming began. She came back to finish the role and earned an Oscar nomination for it.
Q 24What is Big Daddy Pollitt's business in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Cotton planting
Cotton planting made him "the Delta's biggest cotton-planter". He is turning 65 and, though nobody has told him, dying, so his sons' wives are manoeuvring over who inherits the plantation.
Q 25What word does Brick use in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for the lies and liars around him?
Mendacity
Mendacity is why Brick says he drinks. Big Daddy turns the word on him, saying the disgust is really with himself for hanging up when his friend Skipper phoned to confess.
Q 26Who played Big Daddy in both the 1955 Broadway and 1958 film versions of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof?
Burl Ives
Burl Ives, a folk singer turned actor, took the patriarch from stage to screen. The film came out in 1958, yet the Oscar he won for that year was for a different role, in The Big Country.
Q 27In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brick Pollitt is a fading hero of which sport?
Football
Football made Brick a local idol, and whiskey has replaced it. The play opens the day after he broke his ankle trying, drunk, to jump hurdles on the high-school track as he did in his glory days.
Q 28The 1958 film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof dropped which element of the play?
The homosexual angle
The homosexual angle gave way, under Hollywood's censorship code, to what one reviewer called a complicated business of hero-worship. Williams told a ticket queue the movie would set the industry back 50 years.
Q 29Which Williams heroine is the minister's daughter who loves a doctor in Summer and Smoke?
Alma Winemiller
Alma Winemiller: alma is Spanish for "soul", and the play sets her spirit against the appetites of the young doctor. On film in 1961 the part won Geraldine Page a Golden Globe.
Q 30Who won an Academy Award for the 1955 film of The Rose Tattoo?
Anna Magnani
Anna Magnani: Williams wrote the widow Serafina with her in mind, but she did not play it on Broadway. The film, her first Hollywood picture and first English-speaking role, won her Best Actress.