SOURCE: "William Vollmann: An Artist in the American Grain," in Book World—The Washington Post, August 2, 1992, pp. 1, 10.

Moore is senior editor of The Review of Contemporary Fiction. In the following review of Fathers and Crows and An Afghanistan Picture Show, he discusses Vollmann's life and career and calls him "the most prodigiously talented and historically important American novelist under 35."

From where I'm sitting, William T. Vollmann looks to be the most prodigiously talented and historically important American novelist under 35, the only one to come along in the last 10 years or so capable of filling the seven-league boots of such meganovelists as John Barth, William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon. Since 1987 he has published seven books—four novels, two collections of short fiction, and a nonfiction account—which tower over the work of his contemporaries by virtue of their enormous range, huge ambition, stylistic daring, wide learning, audacious innovation and...