SOURCE: "William Carlos Williams and the Modern Short Story," in The Southern Review, Vol. IV, No. 3, July, 1968, pp. 647-64.

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.

William Carlos Williams' "The Use of Force" needs no defense in academic circles. Endorsed by the critics and teachers who print it in anthologies, "The Use of Force" now indisputably belongs. Though the other fifty-one stories in Williams' largest collection are still relatively unknown, fifteen years in the right circles have established this single piece of fiction. Success is always paradoxical for an artist, but Williams' success with "The Use of Force" contains an especially sharp self-contradiction: Williams was an esthetic revolutionary who never stopped thinking of himself as a dangerous outsider or—at the very least—a subversive agent. He usually wrote to...