Paul O. Williams
Paul O. Williams is an American author and academic born on January 17, 1935, in Chatham, New Jersey. He graduated summa cum laude from Principia College in 1956 and later earned both an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Williams taught English at several institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, before dedicating many years to teaching at Principia College, where he became a full professor and department chairman. He was married twice and has two children from his first marriage.
Williams began his writing career in the 1960s, contributing extensively to various literary periodicals and publishing numerous anthologies of poetry, including works focused on haiku. He is best known for his seven-volume science-fiction series, the Pelbar Cycle, which explores the theme of civilization's rebirth after a cataclysm. His contributions to the genre earned him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction in 1983. Additionally, he has written on the aesthetics of haiku and coined the term "tontoism," referring to a specific style of haiku. Williams has actively participated in literary communities, serving as president of the Haiku Society of America in 1999.
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Paul O. Williams
Writer
- Born: January 17, 1935
- Birthplace: Chatham, New Jersey
- Died: June 2, 2009
- Place of death:
Biography
Paul Osborne Williams was born on January 17, 1935, in Chatham, New Jersey, the son of electrical engineer Naboth Osborne Williams and Helen Chadwick Williams. He attended Principia College in Elsah, Illinois, a Christian Science institution where students pledged abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and premarital or extramarital sex. He graduated summa cum laude and with a B.A. from Principia College in 1956, and he later earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Williams taught English at the University of Pennsylvania from 1957 through 1960 and at Duke University from 1961 to 1964 before he began teaching at Principia College in 1964. He remained there for many years, becoming a full professor and chairman of the humanities department before his retirement. Williams married teacher Nancy Ellis in 1961, and the couple had two children, Anne and Evan, before they divorced. Williams married Kerry Lynn Blau in 1985.
Williams began writing in the 1960’s, contributing hundreds of articles, poems, and reviews to such periodicals as Sheba Review, Star Line, Webster Review, Thoreau Journal, Arts, and Christian Science Sentinel. His work has been frequently anthologized and appears in The Edge of the Woods: Fifty-Five Haiku (1968) and Jack, Be Quick: Fifty Poems (1971).
Williams’s first full-length work was a study in local history, Elsah: A Historical Guidebook, written with Charles B. Hosmer. He also wrote two monographs about Elsah, The McNair Family of Elsah, Illinois: Uncommon Common Men and Frederick Oakes Sylvester: The Artist’s Encounter with Elsah.
The sleepy Mississippi River town of Elsah also served as the setting for Williams’s best-known books, the seven-volume science-fiction saga known as the Pelbar Cycle. The series describes the slow rebuilding of civilization a millennium after a holocaust that nearly depopulated the world. The series earned Williams the John W. Campbell Award for the Best New Writer in Science Fiction in 1983.
Williams launched a science-fiction space opera, the Gorboduc series, with the publication of The Gifts of the Gorboduc Vandal in 1989. That book is about the trials of Umber Trreggevthann, a scientist in an intergalactic warrior culture, who chooses slavery over death when his tribe’s spaceship is destroyed during a raid on a star system. A second, long-delayed entry in the series, The Man from Far Cloud, was published in 2004. Williams also has written a study of science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick, Only Apparently Real.
Williams has maintained a lifelong interest in poetry, particularly in the Japanese forms of haiku, senryu, and tanka. In addition to publishing collections of his poetry, he has written a collection of essays, The Nick of Time: Essays on Haiku Aesthetics, which won the Haiku Society of America’s 2003 Merit Award for Best Criticism. Williams is credited with coining the word “tontoism,” which refers to haiku without the articles “the,” “a,” or “an,” which makes the poetry sound as though it were spoken by the Lone Ranger’s Indian sidekick, Tonto. Williams was president of the Haiku Society of America in 1999 and vice president of the Tanka Society of America in 2000.