Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tennessee Williams is best known for A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and The Glass Menagerie (1944). A Streetcar Named Desire is regularly placed on short lists of the finest American plays of the 20th century, alongside Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Both Streetcar and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Tennessee Williams was found dead on the 25th of February, 1983, in his suite at the Hotel Elysee in New York City, at age 71. An initial report suggested he choked on a bottle cap; a corrected report issued on the 14th of August, 1983, determined he had died from a toxic level of secobarbital, having used the cap to ingest barbiturates.
Tennessee Williams won two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. The first was awarded for A Streetcar Named Desire in 1948 and the second for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. By 1959 he had also accumulated three New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards, three Donaldson Awards, and a Tony Award.
Rose Isabel Williams, born in 1909, was one of the closest relationships of Tennessee Williams's life. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman and subjected to a lobotomy in 1943, after which she was institutionalized for the rest of her life. Williams moved her to a private institution near New York City and gave her a percentage interest in several of his most successful plays, with royalties applied to her care. Rose died in 1996, and the approximately $7 million Williams left in trust for her subsequently went to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.
Tennessee Williams was born Thomas Lanier Williams III on the 26th of March, 1911, in Columbus, Mississippi. He spent much of his early childhood in his grandfather's Episcopal rectory in Clarksdale, Mississippi. When he was eight years old, his father was promoted to a position at the International Shoe Company's home office, and the family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, relocating numerous times within the city.
Frank Merlo was an occasional actor of Sicilian ancestry and a veteran of the U.S. Navy who met Williams in New York City. Their relationship lasted 14 years and was the enduring romantic relationship of Williams's life. Merlo served as Williams's personal secretary, managed most of their domestic life, and provided the stability that Williams credited as the foundation of his happiest and most productive years, spent between Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida. Merlo died of inoperable lung cancer on the 20th of September, 1963, and his death preceded a severe decline in Williams's mental health and creative output.