William Hedrington died on Halloween in 1971 in a crash of his ancient sports car on a roadway outside Syracuse, N.Y., where he had just taken up a fellowship in Syracuse University's famed program in creative writing. He was a few weeks shy of 24 years old. He had already chosen poetry as his life's work and was writing poems in a wide range of voices and idioms—poems that many of the nation's leading poets and critics found astonishingly mature and accomplished.
Although Hedrington's poetry was published during his lifetime in many leading literary magazines, One the Downhill Side is the first collection of his work to appear in book form.

Hedrington's college friend Michael Smith was entrusted by Hedrington's family with the task of editing his work. Smith also has contributed to this volume a memoir of Hedrington himself—a young man as remarkable in person as on the page.

"Any reader whose senses have been even slightly dulled by the drone of much contemporary poetry will be shaken into alertness by the vivid and fresh language of William Hedrington. What a pleasure to be awakened to the daylight of this imaginative and highly compelling poet."
—Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States

"Though literary predictions are always chancy, I am quite confident that he will soon make his mark as one of the best poets of his generation."
—Cleanth Brooks (1906-1994), Gray Professor of Rhetoric, Yale University