SOURCE: Walker, Marshall. “Short Stories.” In Robert Penn Warren: A Vision Earned, pp. 72-84. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979.

In the following excerpt, Walker examines the biblical themes of the Garden of Eden and the Fall in “Blackberry Winter.”

The time known as blackberry winter is a spell of unseasonable weather which interrupts summer when blackberries are ripe. It is a climatic incongruity, like T. S. Eliot's ‘Midwinter spring’ in ‘Little Gidding’. Warren's most famous short story began as ‘a way of indulging nostalgia’ for the childhood freedom of being allowed to go barefoot in summer and for the strange ‘feeling of betrayal when early summer gets turned upside-down and all its promises are revoked by the cold-spell, the gully-washer.’¹ ‘Blackberry Winter’ (1946), therefore, developed out of familiar rural materials which could smoothly extend into a representation of Paradise and Fall without any forcing of basic realism. The story perfectly...