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Greg Bottoms (essay date September-October 2001)

SOURCE: Bottoms, Greg. “Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks.” Poets & Writers 29, no. 2 (September-October 2001): 19-25.

[In the following essay, Bottoms discusses Pancake as a Southern writer and offers a thematic overview of his short fiction.]

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

—James Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard”

I came across The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, a bent-spined book wedged back among other fictions, while not shelving at a university library when I was 20. My job, before they “asked me to leave,” was late-shift shelver. I chose to work...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Patricia Vigderman (review date 19 March 1983)
   2. Daphne Merkin (review date 9 May 1983)
   3. Raymond Nelson (review date winter 1984)
   4. Paul Hendrickson (review date 10 December 1984)
   5. Ellesa Clay High (essay date fall 1985)
   6. Geoffrey Galt Harpham (essay date summer 1986)
   7. Albert E. Wilhelm (essay date fall 1986)
   8. Cynthia Kadohata (essay date 1989)
   9. David Montrose (review date 23 October 1992)
   10. David Stevens (essay date spring 1996)
   11. Greg Bottoms (essay date September-October 2001)
   12. Susan Salter Reynolds (review date 7 July 2002)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright