SOURCE: "DuBose Heyward's 'Lost' Short Stories," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. II, No. 2, Winter, 1965, pp. 57-63.

In the following essay, Durham argues that Heyward's early short stories stylistically and thematically foreshadow his later works.

Now that his and George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is generally accepted as the outstanding American folk opera, DuBose Heyward is emerging as a figure worthy of consideration in any account of American literature. His story of Porgy, the crippled Negro beggar of Charleston, in its novelistic, dramatic, and operatic forms has become part of American folklore; his Mamba's Daughters is still remembered as both a novel and a play; and his "Half Pint Flask" has been reprinted frequently in anthologies of short stories.

Though he first gained national recognition in 1922 with a thin volume of verse done in collaboration with Hervey Allen, Heyward had served a hitherto unrecorded apprenticeship in prose fiction...