A Voyage to Pagany by William Carlos Williams

Already heralded as the most brilliant and distinguished stylist in America, William Carlos Williams recorded in this first novel the sensitive reactions of an intelligent American to the static culture of 1920s Europe. In this new and and more coherent phase of his writing he defended the crude but vital American renaissance that plowed ahead into new worlds. In the character of a young American doctor on his sabbatical year in Europe, he surveyed the old world frankly, perceiving not only its tradition and its inherited beauty, but also its growing shoddiness. His quest for beauty in its many forms led him to strange adventures and affairs. These, too, like the mirages of European culture, left him unsatisfied until, in the end, he turned to America - his homeland.

Here is no apology for the expansive American intellectual, but a vigorous analysis and confirmation of our own world of promise. A Voyage to Pagany marked a new epoch in the history of American prose fiction, an unforgettable account of travels through Europe by the father of beat poetry in his rather unique style.