Belonging to a blue-blooded Southern family, Thomas Lanier Williams III was born in Mississippi to Edwina Dakin Williams (the daughter of an Episcopal clergyman) and Cornelius Coffin “C.C.” Williams, who was an often-absent traveling salesman and an abusive man with an alcohol addiction. Williams had an older sister named Rose Isabel Williams (1909-1996) and a younger brother named Walter Dakin Williams (1919-2008). As a young child, Williams became seriously ill and almost died from diphtheria. During his long convalescence, his mother gave him a typewriter, and he started writing. In 1918, the Williams family relocated to St. Louis, Missouri, and young Tom became even more introspective and focused on writing. C.C. Williams saw his sickly son as effeminate and used this as a justification for abusing the boy. After Williams graduated high school in 1929, he attended the University of Missouri-Columbia as a journalism major, where his fraternity brothers dubbed him “Tennessee” due to his drawling southern accent. In 1931, with the Great Depression underway, Williams’s father forced him to drop out of school and take a job at his own place of employment, the International Shoe Company factory. Even so, Williams continued to find time to write. After working several low-wage jobs in the 1930s while trying to get his first plays produced, Williams finally returned to school, graduating from the University of Iowa in 1938.