***Imaginations* makes accessible to the broad reading public live early books by William Carlos Williams, which, except for *Kora in Hell* , have long been hard to find in their original and complete forms.** 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.” The prose-poem improvisations ( *Kora in Hell* ) . . . the interweaving of prose and poetry in alternating passages ( *Spring and All* and *The Descent of Winter* ) . . . an antinovel whose subject is the impossibility of writing The Great American Novel in America . . . automatic writing ( *A Novelette* ) . . . these are the challenges which Williams accepted and brilliantly met in his early work.