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...

The celebrated poet behind such classics as "The Red Wheelbarrow" and "This Is Just to Say" presents a collection of essays about North American history. In the American Grain is, as William Carlos Williams said, "a study to try to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify." Although Williams wrote poetry and prose-and was a doctor-he was not a historian. In this book, he applies a fresh, lyrical perspective...

This is an unusual short classic by poet William Carlos Williams. Written in 1923 and originally published in France, The Great American Novel examines the impossibility of writing such work in America. Williams not only writes the novel with poetic satire and pathos but allows us into his writing process, as he strives to define a young America at the end of a World War and the beginning of the "Roaring '20s."

A look back at the 1950s chronicles the tensions and innovations that lay behind the decade's more placid surface during a time of prosperity and contradiction