It was in the Spring of 1929 that John Gould Fletcher, on a visit to Oxford University, where I was a student, gave me a copy of Soldiers' Pay. I had been out of the South for a long time—in a sense, in flight from the South—and at least half of me was oriented toward Greenwich Village and the Left Bank and not toward the Cumberland Valley in Tennessee; but at the same time I was, I suppose, homesick, and was making my first serious attempt at fiction, fiction with a setting in the part of the South where I had grown up. As a novel, Soldiers' Pay is no better than it should be, but it made a profound and undefinable impression on me. Then came, in the order of my reading, The Sound and the Fury, A I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and These Thirteen.

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