SOURCE: "Jesse Stuart and the Old and New in Short Stories," in The New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. VII, 1937, pp. 183-88.

In the following essay, Wabnitz explores the role of suspense in Stuart's short stories.

Jesse Stuart is young, spirited, stockily built, hair rumpled, hands strong, well-shaped, and large; although himself one of the mountain people of Kentucky, in manner and appearance he has nothing of the grotesqueness that he so often makes us see in his mountain characters. Make allowance for attire and he looks like Robert Burns with whose poetry his has been compared; praise which Jesse Stuart disclaims in one of the sonnets in Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow, a sonnet which he likes well enough to use again in his credo at the end of his volume of short stories, Head o' W-Hollow.

I cannot sing tunes that great men have sung,
 I cannot follow...