Williams operated a medical practice in his Rutherford home from 1910 to 1952 and delivered some 2,000 infants, while maintaining a second-floor studio for his writing. From lines scribbled on prescription pads and typed while he rested between patients, he submitted polished human-centered verse to magazines and journals. He published his first stand-alone volume in 1909 as Poems, an unremarkable start privately printed at a cost of $50. The Tempers (1913) was the first of many verse collections grounded in the vital vernacular of ordinary folk.
Williams maintained a slow, steady evolution into a significant spokesman for localism and the American idiom. Like Frost, he began to focus on everyday figures and objects. He developed mythic and classic allusions without straying from a workaday intent. In Transitional (1915), he moved into free verse, a venue that suited his contemporary flow of Al Que Quiere! [To Him Who Seeks] (1917), Kora in Hell: Improvisations (1920), Sour Grapes (1921), and In the American Grain (1925), the culmination of his intense study of national themes and attitudes. He followed with Collected Poems (1934), An Early Martyr and Other Poems (1935), Adam & Eve & the City (1936), Complete Collected Poems (1938), The Broken Span (1941), and Journey to Love (1956), but published nothing that elevated his literary reputation among average readers. Angered by the success of more erudite poets, he founded alternative magazines to provide a voice for populist poems. In addition to writing verse, he translated the work of Philippe Soupault and published four novels, three collections of short fiction, four anthologies of essays, a libretto, a play, a volume of letters, and an autobiography. At the height of his artistry, he composed a personal epic, Paterson, published in four installments from 1946 to 1951. In 1963, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962) earned him the Pulitzer Prize and a gold medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
