The Great American Novel (Heathen Edition)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was an American physician, author, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lived most of his life in Rutherford, New Jersey. In 1923 he published two works: Spring and All, one of his seminal books of poetry, and his lesser-known, much-overlooked, and vastly underappreciated anti-novel experiment The Great American Novel, which employs what is known today as metafiction to satirize what Williams viewed as the derivative tropes, clichés, and formulaic unoriginality of American novels at the time. Eschewing the time and space of traditional narrative structure and, instead, intermeshing elements of Dadaism, Cubism, Imagism, and plagiarism, Williams "added a new chapter to the art of writing" that simultaneously preempted and foreshadowed postmodernism during the defining decade of modernism.
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William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was an American poet and physician. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey to an English father and a Puerto Rican mother, Williams was raised in a bilingual family and spoke mostly Spanish at home. In 1902, he enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania's medical school, graduating in 1906 before moving to Leipzig to study pediatrics. In 1909, he self-published Poems in Rutherford, marking a humble start to a distinguished career in literature. In 1912, he married Florence Herman and settled in Paterson, New Jersey, where he established himself as a successful family doctor. With the help of Ezra Pound, Williams published The Tempers (1913) in London and became involved with the Imagists, a short-lived literary movement centered on Pound and H. D. In 1923, he published Spring and All, a hybrid book of prose and free verse poems grounded in observations from daily life. Overshadowed by the work of T. S. Eliot, Williams nevertheless became the figurehead of an experimental American modernism that would flower in his five-book epic poem Paterson, published between 1946 and 1958. In addition to his poetry, which he pursued alongside a decades-long career in medicine, Williams gained a reputation as an autobiographer, essayist, and theorist whose interests ranged from the nature of poetic language to the narrative of American history. He served as a mentor to generations of poets, influencing directly and indirectly the artists of the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. Pictures from Breughel and Other Poems (1962), his final work, earned Williams a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1963.
"The Great American Novel sprawls in all directions with a protean elusiveness . . . an exercise complementary to European Dada . . . he cleared out the past by turning from Europe to American in order to create a new art, unrecognized as such by the standing cultural order." -Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives
"One tendency, evident in the novel from André Gide to John Barth, has been to make self-conscious struggle with literary form into the fictional subject itself. Williams appears to have been one of the first twentieth-century writers to try this . . . Considered in its own right, The Great American Novel has a speed, intensity, and exuberance that carry it along in spite of its obscurities." -James E. Breslin, William Carlos Williams: An American Artist
"No jokes or puns, no neologisms, no portmanteau words - Williams' novel asks nothing from the reader except the seriousness of mind to shape the fragmented parts into a whole . . . The Great American Novel is a man's book." -Linda Wagner, The Prose of William Carlos Williams
"Williams' 'struggle' to begin his 'Great American Novel' quickly becomes a metaphor for all 'beginnings' - all attempts by men to create anew and all attempts of new things to realize themselves." -James Guimond, The Art of William Carlos Williams
"The Great American Novel was one of the first anti-novels written in the U.S. - plotless, hostile to the tradition of the novel, hung up on problems of language and time, indifferent to the attention span of its readers, capricious in selection of materials, hiding treasures of description and narration in fogs of aesthetic argument. It requires functional devotion to Williams to read the book once. Read twice it becomes a delight." -Webster Schott
