SOURCE: “William March's ‘Personal Letter’: Fact Into Fiction,” in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXX, No. 4, Fall, 1977, pp. 625-37.

In the following essay, referring to March's story “Personal Letter,” Simmonds explores March's use of his own experience in composing his fiction.

William March's short story “Personal Letter,” written in Germany in the early 1930s, did not appear in print until many years later when March included it in the volume Trial Balance (1945). According to March, Trial Balance contained all those of his short stories he considered “worth preserving.”¹ The book reprinted forty-eight of the fifty-five stories which had appeared in various magazines during the preceding sixteen years and/or in the two earlier story collections, The Little Wife and Other Stories (1935) and Some Like Them Short (1939). Of the seven stories omitted from Trial Balance, five (“Fifteen from Company K,” “The Dappled Fawn,” “Nine Prisoners,” “Sixteen and the Unknown Soldier...