Loyse Youth Deal (known as Borden Deal) was born in Pontotoc, Mississippi, and raised in Union County near New Albany. The economic struggles of his family during the Depression years made an indelible impression on him and later provided abundant material for his fiction. His father, like many other farmers, lost his land when the price of cotton dropped disastrously. Aided by Roosevelt's rehabilitation program, the family procured two mules and traveled to a communal, government-sponsored farming project in Enterprise, Mississippi. This small community of renters was depicted years later as Bugscuffle Bottoms in The Least One (1967). The Darden community, the site of a later farming venture, became Hell Creek Bottom in The Other Room (1974).

Deal left home in 1938, the year of his father's death in a truck accident. The next few years he went through a variety of occupations, including hauling sawdust for a lumber mill, working...