Jesse Stuart 's first five collections of short stories (1936-1958), along with his other continuing literary production, set the pattern for his imaginary world with its distinctively real dimension, while he steadily worked out his vision and expanded his original design. He had no intention of becoming a part of any literary school or group, although the Fugitive-Agrarian writers had in his youth inspired him as much as Robert Burns, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe earlier had in high school. Each writer, he believed, "had to build his mountain of thought and story-line, turning phrases into word-fabric, individually in his own choosing as Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens, Hardy, Yeats, Burns, T. S. Eliot, Twain, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Hemingway, Faulkner, and others had done. In group agreement ... there would be a danger of amalgamation to make a composite word-mountain. This idea formulated in my mind at Vanderbilt," he...