SOURCE: Weaver, Gordon. “Apprenticeship: The Early Years (1928-40).” In Tennessee Williams: A Study of the Short Fiction, pp. 3-22. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

In the following essay, Weaver provides an overview of Williams's early short stories.

His name was not really Tennessee, of course; it was Thomas Lanier Williams. Nor was he from Tennessee; he neither was born nor lived there, except for two years in Nashville when he was too young to have remembered it and a few months with his grandparents in Memphis one summer. The nickname was hung on him at the University of Iowa by fellow students who could not remember just which of the Southern states this quiet young man with the broad accent was from.

The source of the nickname is not so important as the fact that Williams chose to keep it—he could have abandoned it at any point after leaving...