The King William Historic District, located immediately south of downtown San Antonio on the east bank of the San Antonio River, was established in the 1840's, when a large number of Germans immigrated to Texas and settled in the vicinity of San Antonio. The main entry street into the area was named after Kaiser Wilhelm I, King of Prussia in the 1870's. During World War I the name was changed to Pershing Avenue, but a few years after the war the original name was restored, except in the English form of the name, King William, which the area has retained up to the present. In the 1870's about one-third of San Antonio's population spoke German.

Through the last two centuries, a number of literary figures have been associated with the King William area. For example, when Sydney Lanier lived in San Antonio during 1872-1873, he performed, not as a poet but as a flautist, at Beethoven Hall, a German musical club located on Pereida Street. Likewise, Josephina Niggli, who wrote several well-received works about Mexico, including Step Down, Elder Brother: A Novel (1947), lived at one time on King William Street (Milligan). At the present, San Antonio's most celebrated poetess, Naomi Shihab Nye, lives in a house on S. Main Street, which borders the western edge of the King William Neighborhood. Her poetry recently attracted the attention of Bill Moyers, whose PBS segment on living American poets featured Nye reading some of her poems. She was also selected by Texas Monthly Magazine as one of the "20 most impressive, intriguing and influential Texans" for 1998.

Currently, San Antonio's most famous literary personality is Sandra Cisneros, and "Bien Pretty," the final story in her short fiction collection, Woman Hollering Creek (1991), has the narrator living in a neighborhood not far from King William:

A Fulbright whisked [the owners] to Nayarit for a year, and that's how I got to live here in the turquoise house on East Guenther, not exactly in the heart of the historic King William District--it's on the wrong side of South Alamo to qualify, the side where the peasantry lives--but close enough to the royal mansions that attract every hour on the hour the Pepto Bismol-pink tourist buses wearing sombreros. (139)

The autobiographical implications here are pretty obvious in view of the fact that, in 1997, Cisneros had her modest frame house on East Guenther Street painted "periwinkle purple." Her act generated a mini-firestorm in the community, because many of the residents in King William considered her contemporary color scheme inappropriate for this historic district. The controversy was widely reported in the local newspaper, including a pro-con article featuring Cisneros herself and Milton Babbit, a member of the San Antonio Historic Design and Review Board.

For her part, Cisneros argued: