After Mississippi writer Larry Brown published Facing the Music (1988), his first collection of short stories, Harry Crews, whose work Brown had read and admired for years, wrote a cover blurb for a 1996 edition announcing that "talent has struck." Since this propitious beginning Brown has emerged as one of the leading new talents in Southern fiction. His success seems even more remarkable because he is a self-taught literary artist, one who barely graduated from high school. Hard-packed, realistic, and heavily fraught with emotion, his work has drawn readers not only in the South but also throughout the rest of the country.

William Larry Brown was born on 9 July 1951 in Oxford, Mississippi; in an interview with Kay Bonetti, he said he arrived "at the old hospital up the street from the courthouse, but we lived twelve miles out in the country." The family on both sides were country people who...