Breece Pancake plowed new territory for Appalachian writers with one collection of searing stories about ordinary people dealing with layers of obstacles. The "In Their Own Country" program contains first-rate readings from his stories and letters, mixed with discussion of his work by other WV writers and his biographer, Tom Douglass.

From the afterword, by Andre Dubus III, to the 2002 edition of Pancake's stories: "It would be a mistake to consider these stories merely regional, for they go far too deeply for that, by giving us the hollows of West Virginia, its farms and coal mines, barrooms and motels, fighting grounds and hunting grounds and burial grounds, but, most significantly, by giving us its people in all of their tangled humanity, Pancake has achieved the truly universal."    

Details from program: Readings from Pancake's work by John Morris, Kirk Judd, Rick Wilson, Gordon Simmons, and Ann Pancake, Breece's cousin and critically-acclaimed writer in her own right... Sample details: a comparison of four of Pancake's young men facing difficult situations: When a trucker stops by his former West Virginia foster home, an old tragedy unravels --a young man is forced to leave the farm when his mother sells it -- a young man tries to take care of his aging parents while the farm fails.

Personal:  Born in 1952 and raised in Cabell County (Milton).  Attended the graduate writing program at the University of Virginia. Died in 1979.

Publications:  The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, Atlantic/Little, Brown 1983. Little Brown reissued the volume in summer 2002 with a new afterword.

Education and Career:  BA Marshall University 1974.  Had almost completed graduate degree at time of death: University of Virginia 1976-79.  Various laboring jobs. Teacher Fork Union Military Academy and Staunton Military Academy.

Awards and Honors:  Governor's Fellowship in Fiction Writing from University of Virginia 1976, Jefferson Society Fiction Award from University of Virginia 1977, Hoyns Fellowship for Fiction Writing from University of Virginia 1978; publication of three stories in The Atlantic, 1977 - 1979.

Reviewer's Comments: 
--"a young writer of such extraordinary gifts, one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway's" - Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times
-- "Pancake was blessed or cursed with the true creative gift. Readers will return to (these pages) for their sureness and variety of character, their clarity of life imagined and made known " Virginia Quarterly Review
-- "stunning--powerful and astonishing -- Brilliance is on these pages."  USA Today
--"Strong, utterly distinctive fiction -- Pancake's knowledge of his domain resembles in its totality Faulkner's exhaustive knowledge of Yoknapatawpha County  Newsday
-"It is impossible not to admire, indeed, to envy, the writer at work in these stories."  (Robert Wilson in New York Review of Books) 
-"Pancake was one splendid writer.  [His prose is] simple, direct, honest, and so finely crafted that the process of craftsmanship has disappeared."  Detroit News

Excerpts from In Their Own Country:

"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave."  - Breece Pancake, in a letter to his mother from Charlottesville, where he was studying writing.

**
"All of Breece Pancake's male characters have a very deep connection with the land. And when society itself fails them, they just turn away and walk into the woods. They go hunting. They observe the weather. They shoot a deer. This puts them back in primary relationship with the land. I understand that turning away from the failures of the social world, back to something that's natural." 
-Irene McKinney, West Virginia state poet laureate

**
"He'd stay up real late at night, maybe four or six hours later, he'd wake in the wee hours of the morning and maybe write some more. His work ethic was incredible. His fiction is very tight and very well-phrased. And that comes from writing over and over and over again. And some of these stories, he wrote maybe twenty times, maybe ten handwritten drafts, then typewritten drafts.

He told his students to "Look upon your stories as a fine wine, one aged and well-made, not as a cup of instant coffee. Rewriting is the key to refined fiction.

His was a rigorous nose-to-the-grindstone theory of work, one that guided him from the first to last draft."   - Tom Douglass, Pancake's biographer, author of A Room Forever

**
"Pancake had that kind of empathy for the underdog, for the alienated, for the person on the outs. And he does it so well in his stories that, if you don't know anything about his personal life, you can't help but believe that he must have lived that way or he must have been that way, just because he's such a great artist at it.  He was able to imagine a character fully, his creative imagination was just so powerful."  - Gordon Simmons, WV Division of Culture and History

See also:  Contemporary Literary Criticism, Mountainlit.com, Literature  Resource Center, Contemporary Authors Online