II.

Life and Works

Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His father, William George Williams, was from Britain, and his mother, Helene Raquel Williams, was a Puerto Rican-born woman of Basque and French descent. Williams grew up in a household that spoke French, Spanish, and British English. He entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School in 1902, and while there formed friendships with several poets who would go on to great fame: Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and Hilda Doolittle. After an internship in New York City, Williams studied pediatrics at the University of Leipzig in Germany. By late 1912, Williams had returned to Rutherford, set up a private practice, and married his fiancée of several years, Florence Hermann.

Although he developed a busy practice as a doctor, Williams also was a prolific writer, and for much of his life he published a book at least every two years. His most important prose works are The Great American Novel (1923); In the American Grain (1925), a collection of essays on figures from American history; and White Mule (1938), the first novel in a three-book series following the life of one family.

In addition to Paterson, Williams’s various poetry collections include The Collected Early Poems (1938), The Collected Later Poems (1950), and Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), which is a collection of works written from 1950 to 1962.

Williams began to achieve public recognition for his writing in 1950, when he won the National Book Award in poetry for the third volume of Paterson. Three years later he won the Bollingen Prize—awarded by Yale University for achievement in American poetry—and in 1963, after his death, Williams won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Pictures from Brueghel.