The Great American Novel (1923) is an experimental novel by William Carlos Williams. Although he is predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his career. In the defining decade of Modernism, Williams sought to try his hand at the so-called “Great American Novel, ” a concept fueling impassioned debate in academic and artistic circles nationwide. Far from conventional, Williams’ novel is a metafictional foray into matters more postmodern than modern, a commentary masquerading as narrative and a satire of the all-American overreliance on cliché in form and content. “If there is progress then there is a novel. Without progress there is nothing. Everything exists from the beginning. I existed in the beginning. I was a slobbering infant. Today I saw nameless grasses—I tapped the earth with my knuckle. It sounded hollow. It was dry as rubber. Eons of drought. No rain for fifteen days. No rain. It has never rained. It will never rain.” Williams’ novel begins with the word and a birth. Language describes the experience of awakening to experience, of coming into consciousness as a living being in a living world. Using words from everyday speech, he builds a novel out of observations, a book that remains conscious of itself throughout. Like the child whose first experience with the written word often comes from names and slogans stretched over trucks and billboards, the reader eventually comes to accept their new reality, a world where people love and succeed and fail, where history and art intercede to make meaning where they can. The Great American Novel showcases Williams’ experimental form, stretching the meaning of “novel” to its outermost limit. This edition of William Carlos Williams’ The Great American Novel is a classic of American literature reimagined for modern readers.
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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.
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