He was born Thomas Lanier Williams on 26 March 1911 in Columbus, Mississippi, the second child of a Puritan-Cavalier marriage. His mother, Edwina Dakin Williams, prim daughter of the Episcopal minister, had been "swept off her feet" by robust salesman Cornelius Coffin Williams, descended from a line of East Tennessee frontiersmen and political officeholders. During Williams's early years his father was on the road a great deal, so he, his mother, and his older sister, Rose, lived in the rectory with his maternal grandparents. The family moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, when young Williams entered school.
An early childhood plagued by illness—a near-fatal bout with diphtheria left him convinced that he had suffered irreparable heart damage— kept him from the company of other children. A weak physical condition, combined with the influence of his delicate and protective mother, earned him the ridicule of both other children and his boisterous, highly masculine father, who according to Williams nicknamed his son "Miss Nancy."
When Williams was eight years old, his father's promotion to a managerial position uprooted the family from the safe and serene world of smalltown Mississippi.
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