SOURCE: “The Short Story of Jayne Anne Phillips,” in Esquire, Vol. 104, No. 6, December, 1985, pp. 107–12.

In the following essay, Edelstein recounts how Phillips began her career and struggled to write her first novel, Machine Dreams.

“Eudora Welty, Tillie Olsen, Katherine Anne Porter, William Faulkner, and James Agee.” Jayne Anne Phillips pronounces them evenly. “The great writers have a journeyer's wisdom. They have been somewhere limitless and come back. That's not necessarily what they are writing about, but you can feel that in the work.” You not only feel it in Phillips's work, but she's writing about it, and she's living it; and part of what's teasing in the pensive, almost skittish jacket photo from her novel, Machine Dreams, is that she's signaling it too: the look says, I'm far away. I've been somewhere limitless and come back.

She is from Appalachia but now lives in a high-toned suburb of...