["Bread and a Stone" shows that Bessie's] writing of fiction has come to maturity. However he first became interested in his protagonist, Ed Sloan, his problem became to present Ed in all his dumbness (in several senses) and complete lack of any advantages or graces, and yet make us see the potentiality of the man and sympathize with him in spite of his becoming a liar and a murderer. He has succeeded. His Ed Sloan is alive in every fibre and thought, and how in the world he managed to sit inside that brain and follow that thought, catch the exact accent of the thought-speech (as he convinces us he does), and reconstruct with overwhelming conviction the half-witless sequence of causes, impulses, and events, is the secret of a true artist. At a certain point in the story he begins to use the cutback in a fashion that...