Writing Lives and Letters

Book-length academic criticism is voracious. In a publish-orperish world, scholars cast about constantly for subjects that have not been worked over. Critical theory solves the problem nicely, of course, by writing about itself. More traditional text and author-oriented criticism meanwhile finds myriad contemporaries worthy of full-scale study. Here, the subjects of two new books in question are two southern writers who came to large national prominence roughly two decades ago, with the focal figures and the studies themselves making for some curious symmetries across a range of literary and cultural topics. The first is Thomas E. Douglass’ A Room Forever : The Life, Work, and Letters of Breece D’J Pancake. The second is Ruth D. Weston’s Barry Hannah: Postmodern Romantic. Pancake was a young West Virginia writer of great promise albeit slender publication who took his own life at age twenty-seven in 1979. He is remembered for his gritty but wonderfully crafted portraits of contemporary Appalachian life in a single, highly-praised collection of short fiction, The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, published posthumously in 1983, with accompanying appreciations by John Casey and James Alan MacPherson, two of his mentors in the University of Virginia creative writing program. Hannah, in contrast, a Mississippian now in his late fifties, has enjoyed an astonishingly prolific career. With Geronimo Rex, a first novel nominated for the National Book Award, he began fast as a prodigy of southern letters and has never let up, with eleven volumes of fiction, including novels and story collections, published to date and almost always to choruses of equally prodigious praise on the part of reviewers.