SOURCE: "The Novels and Short Stories," in William Carlos Williams, New Directions Books, 1950, pp. 187-246.

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.

The logic of Williams' allegiance to the quest for a knowledge of localism, for a defining of the American grain, has compelled in his fiction a restriction to American materials. The notable exception to this is his first novel, A Voyage to Pagany. While its subject-matter is ostensibly Europe, the Old World, it is, in reality, an assessment of that world through the eyes of an American, its hero, and thus, in effect, an assessment of America too. The Jamesian pattern of New World meets Old has...