SOURCE: "On the Ground," in William Carlos Williams, Twayne Publishers, 1968, pp. 97-118.

In the excerpt below, Whitaker gives a thematic overview of Williams's short fiction.

Though Williams had written short stories during the previous decade or so, not until the 1930's did this form become of major importance to him. In the people among whom he worked, the Depression was now revealing qualities that demanded a brief narrative form: "brokenness and heterogeneity—isolation, color." Temporary uncertainty about his direction in poetry also led him to prose—as a "laboratory for metrics" in which he could listen to live speech, hoping to discover the new. And behind these immediate reasons there was, I think, his increasing need to explore more intensively the minute particulars of that ground to which Dev Evans had returned—that ground on which Williams walked daily. Indeed, the primary stylistic meaning of these stories results...