SOURCE: 'The American Short Story: 1930-1945," in The American Short Story, 1900-1945: A Critical History, G. K. Hall & Company, 1984, pp. 103-46.

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

Other native sons and daughters whose work significantly contributed to the contours of the short story between the wars include two at apparently opposite ends of the spectrum: the American expatriate writer, Kay Boyle, and the doctor-poet of Rutherford, New Jersey, William Carlos Williams. Expatriate and poet are delimiting labels for these two, but they help to account for divergences in the pattern I have been tracing. In her stories, many of them in the 1930s and 1940s written in England and Austria and France, Kay Boyle appeals obliquely to the rich resources of the Adamic myth. Her sophisticated short fiction draws on the American Adam as a frame or context for plots and...