Biografie

He was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, a town near the city of Paterson. He attended public school in Rutherford, New Jersey until 1897, then was sent to study at Château de Lancy near Geneva, Switzerland, the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France, for two years and Horace Mann High School in New York City. Then, in 1902, he entered the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

During his time at Penn, Williams befriended Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and the painter Charles Demuth. These friendships supported his growing passion for poetry. He received his M.D. in 1906 and spent the next four years in internships in New York City and in travel and postgraduate studies abroad (e.g., at the Univ. of Leipzig where he studied pediatrics). He returned to Rutherford in 1910 and began his medical practice, which lasted until 1951.

In his life he helped to deliver more than two thousand babies but regarded his medical career as a way to finance his final goal of becoming a poet.

In 1912 he married his fiancée Florence (Flossie, \"the floss of his life\") Herman. The newlyweds moved into a house at 9 Ridge Road in Rutherford; and his first book of serious poems, The Tempers, was published.

The Williamses spent most of the rest of their lives in Rutherford, New Jersey, although the couple did travel occasionally. One such trip was to Europe in 1924. There Williams spent time with fellow writers such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce. Williams returned home alone that year, while his wife and sons stayed in Europe so that the boys could have a year abroad as Williams and his brother had had in their youth. Much later in his career, Williams traveled the United States to give poetry readings and lectures.

Although his primary occupation was as a doctor, Williams had a full literary career. His work consists of short stories, plays, novels, critical essays, an autobiography, translations and correspondence. He wrote at night and spent weekends in New York City with friends - writers and artists like the avant-garde painters Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. He became involved in the Imagist movement but soon he began to develop opinions that differed from those of his poetic peers, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Williams was a very active member of his community (his parents were strong supporters of the Unitarian church in Rutherford) and he didn\'t hide his political opinions. He aligned himself with liberal Democratic and left wing issues. In 1949 he published a booklet/poem The Pink Church that was about the human body but was misunderstood as being pro-communist. This supposed pro-communism led to his losing a consultantship with the Library of Congress in 1952/3, a fact that led to him being treated for depression. Williams\' had a heart attack in 1948, his health began to decline, and after 1951 a series of strokes followed. William Carlos Williams died on March 4, 1963 at the age of seventy-nine. Two days later, finally a British publisher announced that he was going to print his poems – one of fate’s ironies, since Williams had always protested the English influence on American poetry. During his lifetime, he had not received as much recognition from Britain as he had from the USA. In May 1963, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

His major works are Kora in Hell (1920), Spring and All (1923), Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), Paterson (1963,repr. 1992), and Imaginations (1970).

The Poetry Society of America continues to honor William Carlos Williams with an annual award in his name for the best book of poetry published by a small press, non-profit, or university press.