So much depends upon finding the guy who owned the most famous red wheelbarrow in literature.
If you skipped English class throughout high school, then you probably never ran across William Carlos Williams’s modernist gem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and you probably don’t understand that first sentence of mine. The poem allows for many meanings, but the one that makes the most sense in the context of WCW’s larger project with his writing is basically: State stuff plainly.
In any case, William Logan just discovered that the garden tool WCW describes was not simply an invention of WCW’s mind but a device owned by Thaddeus Marshall, an African American man who sold fish and vegetables in Rutherford, New Jersey.
On July 18, in a moment of belated poetic justice, a stone will be laid on the otherwise unmarked grave of Thaddeus Marshall, an African-American street vendor from Rutherford, N.J., noting his unsung contribution to American literature.
You can see a photo of him right here.
