The chair made its debut in "The Man in the Overstuffed Chair," a raw and moving essay Williams wrote in 1960 three years after the death of his father, Cornelius, the subject of the piece. “The best of my work, as well as the impulse to work,” wrote Williams in a breakthrough line, “was a gift from the man in the overstuffed chair.”

Forty years later, Franzen carefully exhumed the chair – color, context and corpulence intact – and wedged it into the heart of his Midwestern novel. Literary critics call this practice an "inter-textual reference," and while it’s true that Franzen’s novels are inlaid with semi-precious puns and nods to writers that he admires, such as William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, there is something more sacred, more ancestral, going on here than this dry academic term suggests. Williams and Franzen are frequently mentioned together for sharing St. Louis roots, but Williams is a less-discussed influence. Indeed, Franzen declined to talk about Williams and the blue chair for this story.

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