Career
Williams was professor emeritus of English at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. His most notable science fiction works are a series of novels, the Pelbar Cycle, set in North America about a thousand years after a "time of fire", in which the world was nearly totally depopulated. The novels track a gradual reconnection of the human cultures which developed.
Much of the action takes place in the communities of the Pelbar, along the Upper Mississippi River — in the general vicinity of Elsah.
Several cultures, including the matriarchal Pelbar, join together in the Heart River Federation. Others, especially the tyrannical Tantal and slave-raiding Tusco, fall apart after suffering defeats.
All are Pelbar except for Tor who is Shumai. He is also known as a writer of haiku, senryū, and tanka, and wrote a number of essays on the haiku form in English.
In a 1975 essay, he coined the term "tontoism" to refer to the practice of writing haiku with missing articles ("the", "a", or "an"), which he claimed made the haiku sound like the stunted English of the Indian sidekick, Tonto, in the Lone Ranger radio and television series.
Williams was the president of the Haiku Society of America (1999) and vice president of the Tanka Society of America (2000). Williams died from an aortic dissection on June 2, 2009. The Breaking of Northwall (1981) The Ends of the Circle (1981) The Dome in the Forest (1981) The Fall of the Shell (1982) An Ambush of Shadows (1983) Song of the Axe (1984) The Sword of Forbearance (1985) (was republished in 2005–2006 by the University of Nebraska Press) The Gifts of the Vandal (1989) The Manitoba from Far Cloud (2004) The Nick of Time: Essays on Haiku Aesthetics by.