SOURCE: "Jesse Stuart's Story Harvest," in Southwest Revew, Vol. 44, No. 1, Winter, 1959, pp. 83-6.

In the following essay, Bode offers a mixed review of Plowshare in Heaven.

Jesse Stuart is a goodhearted writer. A writer is not to be judged by good intentions; but, nevertheless, Stuart's desire to communicate the look and feel of his country, to tell of his people's needs, griefs, joys, and pretensions—this remains after one has got through worrying about his anecdotal superficiality, mannered lyricism, or Al Capp crudity of stroke. And one must admit that by main strength and enthusiasm, if not always by artistic mobility, Stuart does get a message on humanity across, does hew out, sometimes with woodcut broadness (and with some of the woodcut's effectiveness) a picture of his Appalachian hills and the people inhabiting them.

Stuart continues to stretch his Kentucky tapestry with publication of Plowshare in Heaven, a...