William Carlos Williams was a man of many talents and an apparent master of time management.

Born in New Jersey in 1883, he knew from childhood that he wanted to write. By the time he was in high school he had decided to pursue to vastly different careers simultaneously. He wanted to become a writer and a doctor. He was accepted as a medical student at the University of Pennsylvania, but retained a strong penchant for poetry and literature. He continued his medical career, studying advanced pediatrics in Germany, then setting up private practice in New Jersey and eventually became the chief pediatrician at a hospital.

At the same time he was an enthusiastic and active participant in the avant-garde poetic movements in New York City. While he was at the University of Pennsylvania he befriended Ezra Pound and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), who was also a poet and the daughter of an astronomer. After his time in medical school, he stayed in close touch with Pound and all of his literary activities in the United States and in Europe. He became involved in the Imagist movement at one point, but most closely identified with the avante-garde, including painters Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore.

Where Williams differed from his American and European friends had to do with limiting or eliminating the use of foreign words and phrases in poetry and prose. Williams preferred what he termed "local," rather than pretentious themes. William's literary desire was to create a unique, American poetical language based on the rhythms of American speech, thought, and experience. He wrote and published a book in 1925 that detailed his theories, entitled, In the American Grain.

Much of his fiction and poetry was informed by his medical career. His work deals with working-class patients; particularly women. Williams had grown up middle-class, and so his working-class patients served as an inspirational "other" for his work. While literary critics may not label Williams a poetic genius, they generally agree that his work is more expressive of American sensibility, and drenched with the patterns of American speech, than any poet since Walt Whitman. It is for this reason that he is regarded as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, and why he was accepted as a peer among some of the most brilliant authors of his generation, including Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell and Paul Blackburn.

Williams married Florence Herman in 1912, after he had first proposed to her older sister, who rejected his suit. The couple lived in their hometown of Rutherford, New Jersey for many years. In 1952, Williams was appointed Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress. However, he did not serve in that capacity. He was also the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (posthumously awarded), and the Gold Medal for Poetry of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The Poetry Society of America continues to honor Williams Carlos Williams by presenting an annual award in his name.