SOURCE: "Dr. Williams in His Short Stories," in Image and Idea: Twenty Essays on Literary Themes, New Directions Paperbook, 1957, pp. 155-58.

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

In his prose as in his poetry William Carlos Williams is too hardy a frontiersman of the word to permit himself the idle luxuries of aestheticism. There are too many things to be seen and touched, too many cadences of living speech to be listened to and recorded. Kenneth Burke once said of Williams that he was engaged in "discovering the shortest route between subject and object." Perhaps that explains why in Life on the Passaic River, a collection of nineteen short stories, not one imitates in any way the conventional patterns of the genre. The directness of this writer's approach to his material excludes...