Tennessee Williams Museum

Tennessee Williams first came to Key West in 1941 and eventually made the island his part time home for most of the rest of his life, buying a house on Duncan Street where he wrote much of The Rose Tattoo, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and other major works. That private house is not open to the public, which is where the Tennessee Williams Museum, run by the Key West Art & Historical Society, fills the gap, gathering photographs, letters, personal items, first editions, and material related to Williams’s decades in Key West into a dedicated small museum on Whitehead Street.

The museum’s exhibits trace Williams’s relationship with the island in some depth, from his early visits and friendships with other Key West writers and artists through his later years, when he became a familiar, if famously private, local figure. Because Williams’s Key West period overlapped with a genuine community of writers who either lived on or regularly visited the island, including Elizabeth Bishop and later a wave of other literary figures, the museum situates him within that broader story of Key West as a serious literary town rather than treating him as an isolated celebrity resident.

As of the most recent information available, the museum is in the process of relocating and is temporarily closed to the public, with the Key West Art & Historical Society not yet having published a firm reopening date or new hours. Visitors planning a trip specifically to see this collection should check the Society’s website or call ahead before arriving, since the closure status can change. The Society’s other three sites, the Custom House Museum, Fort East Martello, and the Key West Lighthouse, remain open on their regular schedules during this transition.

When open, admission to the Tennessee Williams Museum is generally the least expensive of the Society’s four sites, reflecting its smaller scale compared to the Custom House or the fort, and it can be purchased on its own or bundled into the Society’s multi site Culture Pass. The collection is compact enough to see in twenty to thirty minutes, which makes it a reasonable add on for visitors already planning to see the nearby Hemingway Home or Key West Lighthouse rather than a standalone destination requiring a special trip.

For anyone building a literary themed day around Key West’s writing history, the museum is normally paired with a walk past Williams’s former Duncan Street house (viewable from the street only) and the Hemingway Home a few blocks away, tracing two of the twentieth century’s most significant American writers through the same small stretch of Old Town streets.