The Great American Novel (Heathen Edition)

William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was an American physician, author, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who lived most of his life in Rutherford, New Jersey. In 1923 he published two works: Spring and All, one of his seminal books of poetry, and his lesser-known, much-overlooked, and vastly underappreciated anti-novel experiment The Great American Novel, which employs what is known today as metafiction to satirize what Williams viewed as the derivative tropes, clichés, and formulaic unoriginality of American novels at the time. Eschewing the time and space of traditional narrative structure and, instead, intermeshing elements of Dadaism, Cubism, Imagism, and plagiarism, Williams "added a new chapter to the art of writing" that simultaneously preempted and foreshadowed postmodernism during the defining decade of modernism.