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."<br /><br />The prose-poem improvisations (<em>Kora in Hell</em>) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages (<em>Spring and All</em> and <em>The Descent of Winter</em>) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing "The Great American Novel" in America . . . automatic writing (<em>A Novelette</em>) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.