In the following excerpt, Gish elucidates the thematic, stylistic, and technical characteristics of Williams's short fiction.

In the following essay, Wagner surveys Williams's short fiction, relating its subjects and techniques to those of other contemporaneous writings.

In the essay below, Slate relates Williams's theories about writing short fiction to the stories themselves, demonstrating the modern qualities of Williams's thought and practice.

In the essay below, Perloff examines psychosexual aspects of the doctor-patient relationships in several medical stories from Life along the Passaic River.

In the following excerpt from a detailed assessment of Williams's fiction to 1950, Koch reviews the stories in The Knife of the Times and Life along the Passaic River, indicating their significance in the development of Williams 's career and of the modern American short story form.

In the following essay, which was originally published in 1950, the author comments on the art of the short story.

[T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens] are the two poets in the American Modern tradition one would least expect Williams to honor. Yet honor them he does and, in fact, he could be said to join their ranks. For in the seven years between the publication of the fourth and fifth books of Paterson, between 1951 and 1958, Williams and his poetry underwent a profound change. In 1951 Williams suffered his first stroke and was forced to retire [from his medical practice]. Three years later he published The Desert Music...

In the excerpt below, Whitaker gives a thematic overview of Williams's short fiction.

In the essay below, which originally was presented as a paper at the Eastern Comparative Literature Meetings in May 1980, Monteiro shows how Williams's own identity as "poet-physician" informs several of his doctor stories.

In the following essay, Mariani closely analyzes Williams 's use of language and its effect on meaning in "Country Rain."

In the following essay, Schwartz offers a psychoanalytic reading of "The Use of Force, " focusing on Williams's representation of violence in the story.

In the following excerpt, Watson surveys Williams's contributions to the short story form.

In the following essay, Corman discusses the chief literary qualities of Williams's writing style in The Farmers' Daughters.

In the essay below, Dietrich analyzes sexually suggestive aspects in the language and tone of ''The Use of Force. "

Having abandoned the borrowed nineteenth-century 'Composition' of his youth, Williams began with the 'Impression'. From 1913 to 1916 the portrait and the pastoral were his best media. If one were to turn for an analogy in painting for the poems in the collection Al Que Quiere, it would be to the Ashcan school of realism, in which the dignity of human life was rendered by impressionistic means. Williams' 'townspeople', although not products of the East Side sl...

In the essay below, Gratto details the autobiographical, medical, and literary components of "Mind and Body."

In the essay below, Gallagher identifies the characters of the child, the doctor, and the parents in "The Use of Force" with the function of id, the ego, and the superego in the human psyche.

In the following essay, which originally appeared in Partisan Review in March 1938, Rahv summarizes the themes of Life on the Passaic River.

The lack of celerity in [Williams'] process, the unfamiliarity with facile or with established solutions wd. account for the irritation his earlier prose, as I remember it, caused to sophisticated Britons. "How any man could go on talking about such things!" and so on. But the results of this sobriety of unhurried contemplation, when apparent in such a book as In the American Grain, equally account for the immediate appreciation of Williams by the small number of french critics whose cu...

Williams was not, like Dickens or like Faulkner, an impersonator. But the habit of listening to voices extended to his own voice, so that he could write down the way he heard himself phrasing things:                  THE POEM                  It'...

Everyone knows the remark by Williams that if canvases were less cumbersome, he might have been a painter rather than a poet. Williams earnestly believed that more than any other art painting held the power to change modern culture. One of his many criticisms of his friend Ezra Pound was that the expatriate "missed the major impact of his age" largely because of his insensitivity to painting…. Bram Dijkstra has assembled a fine volume of Williams's writings on art [William Carlos...

Note the urgency and immediacy of the opening paragraph [of The Use of Force]: "They were new patients to me, all I had was the name, Olson. Please come down as soon as you can, my daughter is very sick." The two sentences might have been punctuated as four, but William Carlos Williams, anxious to get to his point, uses commas to keep us flowing with him. Here and throughout he omits quotation marks for the direct address, another device to convey urgency. From the first rushing sentences Will...

[In the main], Doctor Williams' topics are American—crowds at the movies                   with the closeness and                  universality of sand, turkey nests, mushrooms among the fir trees, mist rising from the duck pond, ...