SOURCE: Bottoms, Greg. “Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks.” Poets & Writers 29, no. 2 (September-October 2001): 19-25.

In the following essay, Bottoms discusses Pancake as a Southern writer and offers a thematic overview of his short fiction.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely. This is because a real writer is always shifting and changing and searching. The world has many labels for him, of which the most treacherous is the label of Success.

—James Baldwin, “Alas, Poor Richard”

I came across The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, a bent-spined book wedged back among other fictions, while not shelving at a university library when I was 20. My job, before they “asked me to leave,” was late-shift shelver. I chose to work the late shift because no supervisors and very few students were around. My non-shelving went...