William Carlos Williams
Poet, Playwright and Physician Dr William Carlos Williams, was born September17, 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey to a middle- class background. He attended the University of Pennsylvennia where he struck up friendships with poets Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.).
Although his poems were published as early as 1909, he gained wide recognition as a poet with the publication of the first volumes of Paterson in the 1940’s. Williams also wrote prose, fiction, and drama. The Encyclopedia Britannica describes him as having "succeeded in making the ordinary appear extraordinary through the clarity and discretness of his imagery". In 1909 he wrote his first play, Bettty Putnam. His other plays include The First President (1936), Many Loves (1942), A Dream of Love (1948), and The Cure (1960).
In 1950, three years before Arthur Miller produced his play The Crucible, Williams had already completed ‘Tituba’s Children’ which, like Miller’s play used the Salem Witch Trials to write about ‘red-baitong’ or ‘witch-hunting’ as it had become known. Although his health had begun to decline following a heart attack in 1948, he continued to write up to his death. He died on March 4 1963, shortly after receiving the Pulitzer Prize. He sustained his medical practice througout his whole life.
William Carlos Williams' Collected Poetry as well as his epic poem 'Patterson' are published by Carcanet in the U.K., a selection of these is also published by Penguin Classics.His complete works (twenty-three titles) are published by New Directions in the USA. The William Carlos Williams Review is published bi-anually at the University of Texas, Austin.
