A Room Forever

Breece D'J Pancake was twenty-six when he took his own life in April 1979, and only afterwards did his stories reach print, praised for their lean, Hemingway-like control and their portraits of the mountain poor of West Virginia. Thomas E. Douglass reconstructs that short life from Pancake's notebooks, letters and manuscripts, and from conversations with family and friends: the Appalachian childhood, the romantic losses, the writing apprenticeship at the University of Virginia and the East Coast literary world's acceptance of his work.

Douglass reproduces story fragments, among them The Conqueror and Shouting Victory, and traces their fear of failure and sense of inescapable disaster back to the writer's own history. He also follows Pancake's influence on Appalachian fiction, including Pinckney Benedict. A careful, humane study for anyone haunted by The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake.