SOURCE: Brinkmeyer, Robert H., Jr. “Regeneration through Community.” In Remapping Southern Literature: Contemporary Southern Writers and the West, pp. 66-105. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Brinkmeyer discusses Bass along with several other Southern writers who have written stories that take place in the American West and utilize narratives which begin with their characters' flight from the South, and end with the creation of a sense of community that resolves personal and inter-personal conflicts.

Recent Southern writers who write about the contemporary West represent a wide cross section of Southern fiction. Despite their diverse styles and interests, almost all of these authors utilize and revise the American myth of flight westward toward freedom. Driving the narrative in almost all of their work is the dream of stepping free from the confining nets of culture and of starting over with the past left tidily behind...