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Pancake, Breece D'J
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
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Boston: Little, Brown, 1983. First Edition. SIGNED by James Alan McPherson and John Casey, who contribute the foreword and afterword, respectively. Fine and unread in a Fine dust jacket. Pancake's only book, a posthumously published collection of short stories. Pancake was a student and aspiring writer at the University of Virginia where he sought out McPherson, who was enduring an unhappy stint teaching there in 1976. McPherson, a barely tolerated black man, and Pancake, a lower middle class West Virginian, formed a close friendship and bond as "outsiders" in Charlottesville, a traditional bastion of the white Southern aristocracy. McPherson brought his talented student to the attention of the editors of Vanity Fair, who bought his first stories (and inadvertently altered his name to Breece D'J Pancake, to the fledgling author's amusement and delight). McPherson eventually and happily left Virginia. Pancake continued to live a lifestyle containing dangerous elements of his hill country upbringing: liberal doses of drinking, fighting, hunting and shooting. Some of these raw elements helped to inform his fiction, providing it with a Faulkneresque vitality that was somewhat at odds with the genteel vision of the South that many of its writers sought to promote. Despite a bright literary future, Pancake swirled in and out of depression, and killed himself in April of 1979. [Book #109523]
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