William Carlos Williams – 1883-1963

Williams grew up in New Jersey and became a pediatrician, practicing lifelong in Rutherford, New Jersey, while writing a unique body of poems and prose, in which he revealed within the mundane and even the ugly—the detritus of modern civilization—the beauty of vitality and passion. His masterpiece, the five-volume poem Paterson, is a complex vision of this New Jersey industrial city as the embodiment of humankind and of modern man in America.