Synopses & Reviews
Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward." The prose-poem improvisations () . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages ( and ) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing () . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
Synopsis
The prose-poem improvisations Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.
Synopsis
makes accessible to the broad reading public live early books by William Carlos Williams, which, except for , have long been hard to find in their original and complete forms.
About the Author
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. He received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where he met and befriended Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). At the same time as maintaining a popular medical practice, he became a prolific poet, novelist, essayist, and playwright. Experimenting with new techniques of meter and lineation, Williams sought to invent an entirely fresh--and singularly American--poetics, whose subject matter was centered on the everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2009.