A first-generation American, William Carlos Williams was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on September 17, 1883. His father, William George Williams, of English ancestry, had been born in England and raised in the West Indies. His mother, Raquel Hélène Rose Hoheb Williams, whose ancestry contained elements of French, Spanish, and Jewish cultures, had been born in Puerto Rico.
With his younger brother, Edward, Williams went to public schools in his hometown. When he was fourteen, he went with his family to Europe for two years, where he attended school first near Geneva, Switzerland, and later in Paris. When his family returned to the United States, he was sent to Horace Mann High School in New York City. He commuted daily from Rutherford by streetcar and Hudson River ferryboat. Williams entered medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. While there, because of his interest in poetry, he met the poets Ezra Pound and H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and the painter Charles Demuth, all of whom became his lifelong friends.
After his graduation from medical school in 1906, Williams interned at the old French Hospital and the Nursery and Child’s Hospital in New York City. His first volume of poetry, Poems, published at his own expense, appeared in 1909. That same year he went to Europe again, where he did postgraduate work in pediatrics in Leipzig, Germany. While in Europe he renewed his friendship with Ezra Pound, and through him was introduced to many writers and artists of prewar London.
After brief trips to Italy and Spain, Williams returned to Rutherford in 1910 to begin the practice of medicine. In 1911, he married Florence Herman, the “Flossie” of his poems. During the next few years, Williams became the father of two boys, William and Paul. In 1913 he bought the house at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford which would be his residence for the rest of his life. His second volume of verse, The Tempers, was published in England that same year. Williams was a very active pediatrician with a wide practice among the industrial workers of northeastern New Jersey. Nevertheless, he continued to be a deeply committed poet and literary man eagerly involved in the artistic life, publishing ventures, and general creative climate of Greenwich Village in the years of World War I and after.
During the 1940’s, Williams contributed to numerous magazines, including The Glebe, Poetry, Others (of which he was associate editor for a time), The Little Review, The Dial, and Broom. He became acquainted with Walter Arensberg, Kenneth Burke, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Kreymborg, Marianne Moore, Charles Sheeler, and other poets and painters. Williams published his third collection of poems, Al Que Quiere!, in 1917 and Kora in Hell: Improvisations, an experimental collection of poetry and prose, in...
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For most of his life Williams waged war against reductiveness—the tendency of human beings to mistake the part for the whole or the explanation for the reality. He wrote lyric poems, an epic, short stories, novels, essays, a remarkable volume of American history, and an autobiography, consciously reshaping these literary forms in the hope of engaging readers more directly and fully with experience. The cultural impact of Williams’s achievements was registered slowly, but his influence on major poets of the succeeding generation has been pivotal, and a sense of the importance of his example continues to increase.
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After attending public schools in New Jersey, spending time in Europe, and then finishing high school in New York, William Carlos Williams enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical School in 1902. While completing his M.D. there, he met Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, and the painter Charles Demuth. In 1910, he began work as a general practitioner in Rutherford, New Jersey; in addition to this practice, from 1925 on he became a pediatrician at Passaic General Hospital. Williams held these positions until several strokes forced him to retire in 1951. His medical and literary careers always coexisted. In 1909, he had his first volume, Poems, privately published. As his reputation grew, he traveled to Europe several...
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