Jonathan Williams was born in Asheville, North Carolina, to Thomas Benjamin and Georgette Williams, a lively couple who soon moved the family to Washington, D.C. They were straight from the gracious strictures of Southern Semiaristocracy (yet stubborn mountain folk to the bone). Williams's father was a multigifted self-made man, and his mother a talented decorator. In Washington, Williams attended that most British and Episcopalian of schools, St. Albans, attached to Washington Cathedral, and left with acute anglophilia and a lifelong taste for cathedrals.

Consecutively, without taking a degree, he studied art history at Princeton, painting with Karl Knaths at the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, etching and engraving with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17 in New York, and the whole range of arts at Chicago's Institute of Design. Then, in 1951, he returned to his native North Carolina mountains where the Bauhaus-influenced school, Black Mountain College, was in...