Robert Coles regards Williams as a social scientist. Williams' works, including poems prove as social documents. In this book the character of literary writing named Paterson, a working class man who went through a working class life with his family. Another character is the Stecher family, who migrated to the USA in order to find a better life. Twenty years ago, Williams remarked to Dr. Coles, who is a child psychiatrist, that novelists were longer interested in the lives of ordinary people with tradition and modern world. Novelists pay more attention to write fictions of sociology and other social sciences, instead of texture of life and sensibility. However, Dr. Coles implies that humanities ran rescue the social sciences from such obscurantism.