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    A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain"
    A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain"
    A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain"
    Ebook66 pages45 minutes

    A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Nonfiction Classics for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Nonfiction Classics for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 20, 2016
    ISBN9781535825856
    A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain"

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      A Study Guide for William Carlos Williams's "In the American Grain" - Gale

      1

      In the American Grain

      William Carlos Williams

      1925

      Introduction

      Although he is best known as a poet, William Carlos Williams's literary output spanned many genres. He wrote numerous novels, dozens of short stories, an autobiography, and a history book and meditation on the true nature of the American character. In this book, Williams attacks the Puritan legacy that he sees as a crippling influence on America and praises the figures in American history who fully engaged with the people and land of the New World. The pure products of America go crazy, he wrote in his poem To Elsie, and his book In the American Grain is an attempt to explain why.

      Williams was a member of the literary movement known as modernism. Some of the movement's greatest figures, including T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, bemoaned the state of the modern world and looked to past cultures as their inspiration. America, for these writers, epitomized the shallow, philistine, history-less, materialistic strain of culture that was beginning to dominate the modern world. These modernist writers (and dozens of others) left their home nations to find refuge and an artistic home in other countries. Eliot repudiated his Americanness and became a British citizen; Pound maintained his interest in the United States but held a condescending view of his home country.

      Williams, almost alone among important modernist writers, stayed in America and devoted himself to appreciating aspects of American culture ignored by his modernist comrades. Through his medical practice, Williams served the working-class and poor citizens of northern New Jersey. He wrote poetry suffused with the imagery and characteristic verbal expressions of America's diverse communities. He also studied the history of the United States, attempting to define America's place in the world differently than did the apologists of manifest destiny or the European detractors. With In the American Grain, written when Williams was forty years old, he added to the observations of a lifetime a systematic study of the original documents of America's discovery and colonization. In the book, he rereads American history in an attempt to identify what really makes up the American grain.

      Author Biography

      One of the best-loved, most enduring, and most American of all poets, William Carlos Williams balanced a life of aesthetic contemplation with a life of constant, hands-on involvement with the most brutal facts of life. Forever envious and resentful of the American modernist poets, like Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot, who fled to Europe to live bohemian lives, Williams stayed home in New Jersey and practiced family medicine among the poor and working-class citizens of his region. He stayed involved in the artistic ferment going on in the world, however, and established and maintained friendships with many of the writers, painters, and photographers who were creating the movement known as modernism. Like his contemporary, Wallace Stevens, Williams identified himself primarily with his profession and only secondarily with his vocation of poetry. Also like Stevens, this split caused him endless inner turmoil, but also provided him with material and inspiration for one of the truly great bodies of work in American literature.

      Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883. His father was British by birth and never became an American citizen, while his mother's family came from a number of Caribbean islands and her own ancestors were French, Dutch, Spanish, and Jewish. She preferred to speak Spanish or French at home, and many exotic foreigners passed through the Williams' house because of her. Williams attended public schools in Rutherford and was frequently at the Unitarian church in the town (his father was one of the church's founding members). When he was fourteen, Williams's mother took him and his younger brother Edgar to Europe for the year, where they lived in Geneva and Paris. Returning to the United States, the boys enrolled at the Horace Mann school in upper Manhattan. If Williams did not excel at Horace Mann, his performance there was at least an improvement over his dismal work at the Swiss and French schools where he had recently studied. While at Horace Mann, he came under the influence of the popular English teacher William Abbott. Abbott's love of poetry was infectious, and Williams soon decided to devote his life to it.

      Williams's resolution was a private one, though. Acceding to his parents' desires, Williams enrolled in the dental college at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902 and later transferred to the medical school. While

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