Varsity benefits from writer’s will

Press, 14 March 1983, Page 9

Varsity benefits from writer’s will

NZPA Key West, Florida The will of the playwright, Tennessee Williams, leaves k the income from his estimated SUSIO million estate to a small Tennessee university ; to promote innovative wriK ing and aid needy authors. Williams, who med on February 25 at the age of 71, instructed in his will that income from his estate should create the Walter E. Dakin Memorial Fund, in memory of Williams’ grandfather, who enrolled at Sewanee in 1895. ‘lt’s really beautiful,” said Robert Ayres, president of the University of the South, a small liberal arts college at Sewanee, Tennessee. The will says that the fund “shall be for the purposes of encouraging creative writing and creative writers in need of financial assistance.” The author of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “The Glass Menagerie” was closed to his grandfather, an Episcopal priest who died aged 98 in 1955. Williams’ will, written in September 1980 and slightly modified last September, also requests that income from the estate be used to care for his 73-year-old sister, Rose,' who now lives at a New York sanitarium. She received a lobotomy when she was 24.