From Tennessee Williams - Memoirs., page 2 of the hardback, 1975, Doubleday. About finding an International Who's Who book that listed him and some facts, inaccurately.
"Among the list of my honors and awards was the astonishing announcement that in a certain year of the early forties I had received a grant of one thousand dollars, yes, what is called a "big one," from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. It is the year, not the donor, of the alleged grant that stands out so prominently in my mind, for that was the year (several years before my life was changed irrevocably by the success of "The Glass Menagerie") in which I had to hock literally everything I owned, including an old borrowed portable typewriter and dirty flannel shirt, riding breeches and a pair of boots which were relics of a term in the study of equitation I had taken in preference to regular ROTC at the University of Missouri. And it was the year when I bounced from lodging to lodging for nonpayment of rent, which was a minimal rent, and it was the year when I had to go out on the street to bum a cigarette, that absolutely essential cigarette that a living and smoking writer must have to start work in the morning..."
