[Stuart has a distinct vision of life which permeates all of his novels.] There is the dark world…. It is the world which Stuart sees around him—Kentucky or Appalachia—but is representative of the universal and the characters who live in the dark world are universal men. The dark world is dead or is dying. And at this point the Stuart cycle begins.

From the dark world, or the dying world, comes a world of light and all the symbolic overtones contained therein. But the world does not, cannot, act alone. There must be a force, the life force, which generates from the death a substantial rebirth. That force is youth and in a symbolic sense is the savior of the culture and of mankind.

Time in the cycle becomes involved in what we have spoken about before—the oneness, the single entity, the past, present and...