When literary historians a hundred years hence write a history of the American short story, Jesse Stuart's name may well be near the top. Stuart has written well in the genres of the novel, essay, and poetry, but for many of us his greatest talent has been shown in the short story which has always been his special delight. Doubtless he has written too many short stories (some five hundred at the last count), but we should not hold this against him since he has lodged so many of that five hundred everlastingly in the imagination of America. Stuart, like many American writers, has created a magic sense of place. He has brought to lasting fictional life the world of W-Hollow, the locale of most of his short stories. W-Hollow now joins Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Elizabeth M. Roberts's Pigeon River country, and Thomas Wolfe's Altamont as one of the places we visit imaginatively and lose ourselves in.

The present volume, Clearing in the Sky, clearly has about it that talismanic sense of place which fascinates American readers. This book gives us in generous portions a mountain way of life which is now long past but which was once prickly hard with the thorny individualism of Kentucky mountaineers. W-Hollow is a world of hills and mountains, dark hills in the wintertime but marvellous flowering hills in the spring. It is a hard land where people make their living by hardscrabble farming, cattletrading, mining, timbering, or moonshining. The people are primarily of Scotch-Irish or English stock with old-fashioned names—Sam Whiteapple, Cief Salyers, Battle Keaton, and the Powderjays, Pa and Ma and children Finn and Shan; Shan frequently functions as the first person narrator in the stories.

What has made this world of Stuart's short fiction so lively, so compelling that readers for the past fifty years have followed it with timeless fascination? Though genius can never be analyzed to its ultimate source, it can at least be annotated and described. Among the obvious virtues of Stuart's short stories are their convincing primitivism, humor, natural talk style, and epiphanic insight.

Take, for example, his hard primitivism. If the term seems needlessly abstruse, let us say his short fiction is of the earth, earthy. In Stuart's phrase he is "just a dirt-colored man." He is a "one horse farmer singing at the plow." His fictional creatures are children of the earth, a voice from the clods. His stories call us ever to the outdoors. They give a poet's voice to the far and lost land of the Appalachians. We open Clearing in the Sky and get the odors of new plowed ground and feel the fine mist of nature blow into our face. A father hoists a handful of rich loam from the virginal soil of the story "A Clearing in the Sky" and smells its fecund odors with a kind of ecstasy. Stuart stops under the oaktrees and prays an earth-prayer—"Give me life close to the earth." "Get close to the soil and know Him" (Beyond Dark Hills).

The story "Clearing in the Sky" is an excellent example of Stuart's belief that earth and nature provide a healing, annealing power to men. In that story a father conducts his son to the top of a mountain where the father has a vegetable garden in virgin soil. The father explains that the doctors had given him up, had told him he had no chance to live. He has been saved by his work in the virginal garden soil. "The best days are the first to flee" wrote Willa Cather in My Antonia, translating a line from Virgil's Georgics. This is the classic theme of the primitivist and it is stated succinctly here by Mitch Stuart who yearns back to the garden world of his youth. "Clearing in the Sky" is his therapy which does for him what physicians could not do. Later Stuart mulling over the earth tie that both his mother and father had, wrote: "They were the least book-educated but the best earth-educated people I have ever known."

Stuart as a short story writer learned to follow his own life and his instincts. Like Robert Frost, Stuart can say that almost all of his stories are based on events that either happened to him or were told to him. He has written from within a great globe of actual event and of myth and oral tales of which he is the center. More than that the greater part of his work falls for the most part into readily discernible categories. Stuart and his editors have already recognized these categories by bringing out a volume of short stories, Save Every Lamb, in which all the stories have to do with farm animals. Later Stuart published Dawn of Remembered Spring in which every story features a snake. One familiar with Stuart's work could easily pick stories for a volume simply on dog stories, or one on political stories, or one on politics, moonshine, etc. Please note that the present volume mingles several categories. Stuart's strong primitivistic, agrarian bent is featured in the title story, "Clearing in the Sky," as well as in "Testimony of Trees," where Uncle Mel foils a land thief by demonstrating that an old blaze mark never completely disappears from a tree; i.e., nature, which provides so many norms to man, can also be a silent witness in a court battle. Other categories found in the stories that follow are animals, politics, feuds, and moonshine. An important mode in the above categories is Stuart's brand of southwestern humor. Although there is a streak of surrealistic or "black bile" humor in Stuart, a mixture of the comic and horrible, this does not appear in Clearing in the Sky. In the present work, Stuart's humor is a good natured reveling in comic incongruities, as in Sam Whiteapple's corn eating duel with Lester Pratt's game rooster ("The Champion").

Stuart is a true devotee of animals. He finds them splendid, courageous, and admirable. In the present volume, at least six stories revolve about animals and one about bees. In "The Champion," champion eater Sam Whiteapple matches himself against a cock-of-the-walk rooster at eating raw corn with farcical results. "To Market, to Market" trots out Pa and his prize bull trained to walk on his hind legs at Pa's command. Pa takes him to market and has a run-in with the local pin-hookers where, in classic comic fashion, the con man gets conned. "Fight Number Twenty-five" enlists our sympathies for a mongrel dog who has to take on a wildcat that has slaughtered a vast number of dogs. "Horse-trading Trembles" is a traditional tale of the old South (A. B. Longstreet's "The Horse Swap") and of Faulkner's The Hamlet translated into an Appalachian milieu. Once again the cheater gets cheated. "No Hero" pits a six-foot five-inch bean pole who weighs 135 pounds against a 385-pound bear in a wrestling match which comes to a miraculously gentle conclusion. "Battle with the Bees" shows the organized mayhem which results when a hundred beehives are turned over by marauding hogs and the bees invade the family farm house in a mad orgy of stinging. "Hot-collared Mule" shows how Pa learns a lot more about mules from a retired mule skinner who cuts down Pa's braggadocio. Essentially a third of the stories in this book treat animals, their habits, devotion, and idiosyncrasies. These stories record Stuart's deep kinship with the animals of the earth and his almost mystical feeling for the wild life of the earth, a feeling very similar to Thoreau's thoroughly primitive "Brute Neighbors" chapter in Waiden. This sentiment is italicized for us by Stuart's final line in Save Every Lamb—"And the saddest and loneliest countries in the world are those without wildlife."

Lesser categories in this volume are the stories of politics—"Thirty-two Votes before Breakfast," "Road Number One," and "Governor Warburton's Right-hand Man." These confirm the Kentucky cliché that "politics are the damnedest in Kentucky." Then there are the moonshine stones, "Coming Down the Mountain" and "Evidence Is High Proof." The remaining stories treat feuding, social consciousness, and young love.

Please note that all the stories in this book were published between 1941 and 1950. The years from 1930 to the mid 1950s were Stuart's freshest and more spontaneous period. The stories written in this period are closer to the elements of nature that he enjoyed so much as a young man; the dialect is stronger, the language more evocative. This early fiction becomes in the aggregate a great sustained elegy to a lost world of Appalachian experience, a nostalgic greeting and farewell to an important part of America's past.

I would argue that this short fiction is essentially optimistic. Stuart believes in and practices Allen Tate's concept of "Knowledge Carried to the Heart." He has continued to live so close to his material that he can, as he says, "hear it snore." As a good primitivist he is not out of time with nature and his best short stories are not out of time with nature. Even city people—in some cases especially city people—will find the timeless archetypes of Stuart's fiction attractive. Animal fables are as old as civilization, their appeal timeless.

The reader who comes to the present work will find that the author is indeed a genuine, original, marvelously fecund writing man. These stories are well representative of his genuineness and his great vitality. They are the incarnation of a matchless individuality. Stuart says "yes" to life all along the way. He obviously belongs to what R.W.B. Lewis in The American Adam calls "the party of hope." These stories are a welcome part of his affirmation.