In the American Grain

By William Carlos Williams

Book Overview

William Carlos Williams was not a historian, but he was fascinated by the texture of American history. Beginning with Columbus's discovery of the Indies and moving on through Sir Walter Raleigh, Cotton Mather, Daniel Boone, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allan Poe, and Abraham Lincoln, Williams found in the fabric of familiar episodes new shades of meaning and configurations of character. He brought a poetic imagination to the task of reconstructing a live tradition for Americans, and what results is one of the finest works of prose to have been penned by any writer of the twentieth century.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811202305
• ISBN13: 9780811202305
• Release Date: January 1956
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 0.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Cotton Mather: Fat and Dumb?

I have just finished reading this book for the second time, once in depth in college as a history major. Now a second time for pleasure as I have retired from fifty years of teaching. America as a nation that will not read: just ask me, papers about the wrong book, "it had a (title)name that was close" I was told more than once? Every Amarican Indian should read this book as well as Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" and some of "what happened" to them will be understood? In view of what is going on in Iraq today can be understood against the backdrop of in the grain, if only it could be read. There can be no bright future in America until we learn where we came and who we really are but much more, just what WE DID to each other becuase we knew no philosophy of good and only the philosophy of narrowness of the puritins'.Cotton Mather was the Rush Limbaugh of his day without the drug input. Regards, JoeSmoke

Perspective on American Culture

In the American Grain is William Carlos Williams's outstanding and interesting perspecitive on the formation of American culture and ideals. Set as fictional and nonfictional stories of historical figures and their place in creating what Williams' calls the American Idiom. Williams provides the reader with some of the most interesting and provocative writting in the 20th century. He has supplied the piece with dramatic and extreme views on the state of American Art, Culture, and History like few before or since. An authoritative text for anyone seeking a realistic view of American Society.