A master of irony and satire, William March created in his Pearl County and Reedyville novels and short stories a fictive world as valid and as memorable as Faulkner's own Yoknapatawpha County. In his works March displays an acute insight into the human mind which discomfits many readers, so much so that he has on occasion been accused of being too "clinical," some of his novels and short stories being likened to extracts from a psychiatrist's casebook. The criticism is somewhat unfair, for his work is, above all else, imbued with a deep sense of humanity and compassion.

The second child in a family of eleven children, William Edward Campbell was born in Mobile, Alabama, and his childhood was spent in the sawmill country of west Florida and south Alabama. The family was poor, and, due to the father's work as a timber "cruiser" estimating various stands of...