Mr. Williams died of complications of the coronavirus on July 17 in Manhattan, his cousin, Clayton Carrington, said. He was 85. Mr. Williams was also being treated for pancreatic cancer.
“Poet, Essayist and Editor”
Gerald M. Williams was born on June 2, 1935, in the Bronx to Joseph and Joyce (Sims) Williams. His mother was a high school teacher, and his father was a truck driver. Gerald spent his teenage years in Boston, and after graduating from The English High School there, he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1957 from Boston University.

He began his career after being discharged from the Army in Europe in the 1950s, when he went to work in Paris for Olympia Press, which published erotic and avant-garde fiction by writers like Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller and William Burroughs — work that was often banned in English-speaking countries.

In addition to contributing to numerous literary publications, like New Letters, The Massachusetts Review and Harvard Review, he wrote a book-length biographical poem titled “Blowing Up Hitler: A Life of Johann Georg Elser, Would-Be Assassin” (1986).

Mr. Williams returned to the United States in the late 1960s and settled in Manhattan, where he became an associate editor of Reader’s Digest and translated art books from Dutch, French and German into English for Harry N. Abrams, Inc., now Abrams Books.

As seen in a post from The New York Times, Lives We’ve Lost