The Deceptive Ground of History: The Sources of William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain

The author investigates the range of historical sources used by William Carlos Williams to support his writing of his 1925 history of America, In the American Grain and argues that Williams sought to show how such narratives were constructed by refusing or disrupting their authoritative status. Conrad contends that Williams’s wish to wage a war on historians was contradicted by the latter’s reliance on historians’ sources. In the American Grain is seen to be a modernist act of historical writing in which the author educates himself about the processes involved in the making of US historical narratives while seeking to disrupt notions of historical verisimilitude.