SOURCE: Hale, Allean. “Tennessee Williams: The Preacher's Boy.” Southern Quarterly 38, no. 1 (fall 1999): 10-20.

In the following essay, Hale discusses autobiographical aspects of “The Preacher's Boy.”

In the Tennessee Williams papers at the University of Texas is an early undated story called “The Preacher's Boy” by Thomas Lanier Williams. It begins: “When the preacher and his wife came to Creve Coeur, Mississippi, their son was a delicate boy of nine years. A congenital weakness of the heart … kept him from leading an active child's life. His features were spiritually beautiful, his skin transparently fine. Blue veins were visible around his throat and temples. His hair was a cloudy gold and his eyes were as introspectively still at times as blue pools in the middle of a forest and then as mobile as tongues of blue flame.”¹

Clearly, Williams was describing himself, and the interesting point is that he thought...