He serves the mostly low-income immigrant population who in work in the industrialized regions of the Passaic River valley, set in New Jersey during the Great Depression.

The Poles, the Italian mothers, the wild children, the unemployed, the furtive adolescents, all these aspects of the life of a small industrial town in America are explored with that warm authenticity of observation which sheds clarity and illumination into the disordered areas of the human soul.

Life Along the Passaic River, for the most part, uses understanding rather than vindication as its dominant tone…the stories illustrate the bravery or humor or solidarity of that life…This is truly the doctor's view of his people.

The tone is lightly ironic, almost sardonic…”[12]Wagner considers the Passaic anthology “Williams' strongest collection of stories” that comprise “the doctor-oriented narratives that are Williams' forte.”[13] Critic Robert F. Gish writes: “In Passaic, more so than in any other collection of his stories, memorable characters come to the forefront as living people, people with names and desires that at once typify and transcend their kind...Part of the cynicism and part of the hostility expressed here by Williams and his personae is due to the inequalities in class, education, income, intelligence and sensibilities…hard times are recorded on more than one level.

Williams’s own middle-class respectability and security adds to the poignancy of the disparities between class and economic status of the individuals living along the Passaic.”[14]