Customer Reviews

In the American Grain (New Directions Paperbook)

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In the American Grain is William Carlos Williams's outstanding and interesting perspecitive on the formation of American culture and ideals. Set as fictional and nonfictional stories of historical figures and their place in creating what Williams' calls the American Idiom.

Williams provides the reader with some of the most interesting and provocative writting in the 20th century. He has supplied the piece with dramatic and extreme views on the state of American Art, Culture, and History like few before or since. An authoritative text for anyone seeking a realistic view of American Society.

Published in 1925, this book of historical essays can be uneven both in method and interest but is, at its best, brilliant, and, even where it fails, mostly of interest. The subject matter stretches from Eric the Red to Abraham Lincoln, and from one page (Lincoln) to a lengthy set of essays on Puritanism. The strength of the book is the evocative writing and Williams' ability to bring a new way of looking at subjects that have received extensive treatment in the past.

His approach seems particularly suited to personalities at the margin of American development: Hernando de Soto, Cotton Mather, Pere Sebastion Rables and Aaron Burr. I would approach this more as a book of essays than a history. Slow your reading pace to savor Williams' rhythm. Allow him to transport you to each venue as you try to judge the past through its own framework.

Williams certainly has a point of view about American character which he develops through these selected profiles. But he does not hide his bias so it remains up to the reader whether to agree or to take issue.

William Carlos Williams has written a classic text, poetic and profound, of vignettes about American icons who shaped our society throughout
history. This is a fever dream of impressionistic prose, cutting into the heart of each historical character, what they did, what it meant and still
means. History as shimmering as a chiaroscuro.

I have just finished reading this book for the second time, once in depth in college as a history major. Now a second time for pleasure as I have retired from fifty years of teaching. America as a nation that will not read: just ask me, papers about the wrong book, "it had a (title)name that was close" I was told more than once? Every Amarican Indian should read this book as well as Dee Brown's "Bury my heart at Wounded Knee" and some of "what happened" to them will be understood? In view of what is going on in Iraq today can be understood against the backdrop of in the grain, if only it could be read. There can be no bright future in America until we learn where we came and who we really are but much more, just what WE DID to each other becuase we knew no philosophy of good and only the philosophy of narrowness of the puritins'.Cotton Mather was the Rush Limbaugh of his day without the drug input. Regards, JoeSmoke