mon / key west / tennesse williams my heart

During the years Tennessee Williams lived in Key West, he swam at South Beach every morning before sitting down to write. "I work everywhere," Williams said of Key West, "but I work best here.

Tennessee Williams arrived in Key West in 1941, when he was 30 years old. He came here to write plays and swim - the former exhausted him and the latter relaxed him. Born Thomas Lanier Williams in Mississippi, his father was a traveling salesman and his mother a "Southern Belle" transplanted from her birthplace: Ohio.

After his first major success, The Glass Menagerie, and his second, A Streetcar Named Desire, he had enough money to buy a home in Key West, a one-and-a-half story Bahamian at 1431 Duncan Street. Although he loved it here, he spent most of his life in a series of hotels and rented apartments at other locations in the United States and Europe.