A Man of Letters

Q & A, Hosted by Jay Nordlinger · Mar 15, 2026 · 36m · transcript

Don Williams—Donald Mace Williams—is a writer. A poet, a novelist, a journalist, a translator, and so on. A real man of letters. He has been steeped in poetry all of his life. When he and his family were living in tents during the Depression, he had Mark Van Doren’s Anthology of World Poetry at his side. That amounts to an education, in one volume.

But Williams went on to have a lot more education, in the classroom and beyond.

He was born in Texas on “Black Thursday”—October 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed. He has titled one of his novels “Black Tuesday’s Child.” (Note the switch of…