life of williams

William Carlos Williams was an American son, with a diverse lineage. Williams mother was of Dutch and Basque decent, and his father of English and Puerto Rican ancestry. He considered this heritage as unique, but as very American. His family moved to Rutherford, New Jersey, were he was born on September 17, 1883. He attended local schools for most of his education. When he was fifteen, he spent a year in Switzerland and France with his younger brother Ed. Upon arriving back in the States, he enrolled in the Horace Mann School in New York. After graduating from high school in 1902, he attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Dentistry.

This first year at Pennsylvania was like most for freshman: he was away from his entire family for the first time and was lonely. He attended church service, and tried to get in to several clubs around campus, but the zenith of his efforts to fit in was his violin's answer to a piano being played down the hall of his dorm. A sophomore soon approached Williams and asked about the violin. Williams conceded he was a bad player, and that poetry was something he had a keen passion for. The piano player, Morrison Van Cleve, soon produced one of his classmates, Ezra Pound, and a friendship was born that would last sixty years.

The next year, Pound switched schools to Hamilton, but he and Williams stayed in good contact, and would spend summers together. Williams was dissatisfied with Dentistry, and so switched to a medical program. During this time he met several other important figures of the early twentieth century, like Charles Demuth and Hilde Doolittle. He also learned about transcendentalism, and in many ways became a student of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Williams graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1906, and then started his medical career through several internships. During this time, he met his wife, Florence Herman, to whom he proposes in 1909. Also in 1909, his first small volume of work, Poems, was published. He then took his second trip abroad to study pediatrics in Leipzig, and visit his friend Pound in England. He also traveled through much of Western Europe on this trip.

Williams arrived back in America in 1910 and took a job as the head school physician in Rutherford, his hometown. He married Florence Herman on December 12, 1912, and over the next several years he fathered two sons, published several works, and started meeting regularly with other literary and art figures, including poet Wallace Stevens and artist Marcel Duchamp.

Through the next forty years, he met many different figures in the literary world, and published many works. Williams always thought of himself as an underrated poet, and used his connections to help him get published and recognized. Williams finally was recognized on a grand scale, late in life, as he won the National Book Award, was appointed Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, and won the Bolligen Award. He kept his own medical practice through much of this time. When he published Paterson 1, an epic dealing with life in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1946, his health had started failing. Williams had several strokes and heart attacks, and a bout of severe clinical depression. During this time he published five books of Paterson, an autobiography, a book of essays, and a few plays. William Carlos Williams died on March 4, 1963, in Rutherford, New Jersey. He received the Pulitzer and Gold Medal for Poetry that year, posthumously.