Imaginations Kora in Hell / Spring and All / The Descent of Winter / The Great American Novel / A Novelette & Other Prose

Written between 1920 and 1932, all five were first published in small editions, three of them in France. These are pivotal and seminal works, books in which a great writer was charting the course he later would follow, experimenting freely, boldly searching for a new kind of prose style to express "the power of the imagination to hold human beings to life and propel them onward.#xE2;#xAC; The prose-poem improvisations ( Kora in Hell) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages ( Spring and All and The Descent of Winter) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing ( A Novelette) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.