ated Rod Townley, "was probably Eliot's success. Another may have been his own success, known only to a few, in Spring and All. For decades thereafter he could not outdo himself; some think he never did." Instead, Williams wrote prose. And in it he concentrated on one subject in particular: America. Williams explained his attraction towards America in a 1939 letter to Horace Gregory: "Of mixed ancestry I felt from earliest childhood that America was the only home I could ever possibly call my own. I felt that it was expressedly founded for me, personally, and that it must be my first business in life to possess it." He later echoed this sentiment in his preface to Selected Essays. "I loved my father but never forgave him for remaining, in spite of everything, a British subject," Williams admitted. "It had much to do with my sometimes violent partisanship towards America." As a result of such feelings, reasoned Vivienne Koch, "the logic of Williams' allegiance to the quest for a knowledge of localism, for a defining of the American grain, has compelled in his fiction a restriction to American materials." So, in In the American Grain, Williams tried "to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify" by examining the "original records" of "some of the American founders." In its treatment of the makers of American history, ranging from Columbus to Lincoln, In the American Grain has impressed many as Williams's most succinct definition of America and its people. D. H. Lawrence, for example, learned from Williams that "there are two ways of being American, and the chief... is by recoiling into individual smallness and insentience, and gutting the great continent in frenzies of mean fear. It is the Puritan way. The other is by touch; touch America as she is; dare to touch her! And this is the heroic way." Another prose book of the period, A Voyage to Pagany, was a type of travel book based on the author's ...
