SOURCE: “The Fiction of Pressure: William March's Short Stories,” in The Mississippi Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Spring, 1983, pp. 105-15.

In the following essay, Routh examines the role of stress and obsession in March's short stories.

In the penultimate of his 99 Fables, William March (1893-1954) depicts the artist's fate: the artist is appreciated only after he has died. But March himself has been dead nearly three decades now, and his fiction—six novels, two novellas, his fables, and over sixty short stories—still awaits the recognition it merits. As anyone who attempts to do work on March quickly learns, he is discussed in very few studies of American novelists, short-story writers, or Southern writers (much of March's fiction is situated in and around Reedyville, a fictional setting for a rendering of March's own native South Alabama). Nor is he to be found in most standard reference works on literature...