William Carlos Williams
An item at American Writers Museum
William Carlos Williams captured the beauty of everyday life with his conversational writing style. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson before him, Williams preferred "words washed clean" of metaphor. He sought a new art form based on the "immediacy" of experience, with direct and tactile poems like his deceptively simple "The Red Wheelbarrow" (1923). Williams's approach clashed with his contemporary T. S. Eliot but influenced later poets like Allen Ginsberg.
Williams spent most of his life in Rutherford, New Jersey. His greatest work, the epic poem Paterson (published between 1946 and 1958), was about Paterson, New Jersey, just 7 miles away. He saw the city's long history as a metaphor for a man "beginning, seeking, achieving and concluding his life."
AMERICAN VOICES
An exhibit at American Writers Museum
American writing is distinctive, diverse, and comes in many forms from across the nation. The 100 authors featured here represent the evolution of American writing. Learn more about each writer on the timeline by turning the panels below their portraits. Explore centuries of writing by pulling, turning, and touching the interactive elements on the counter.
This is not meant to be a list of the greatest or most influential writers. Instead, we present authors and works as part of the American story as it grows and changes. Taken together, this rich literary heritage reflects America in all of its complexity: its energy, hope, conflict, disillusionment, and creativity.