A Room Forever: The Life, Work, And Letters Of Breece D'j Pancake

by Thomas E. Douglass

After twenty-six-year-old author Breece D'J Pancake took his own life in April 1979, the West Virginian's posthumously published short-story collection made a considerable impact on the world of letters. In A Room Forever, Thomas E. Douglass offers a detailed portrait of Pancake's short life, examining the varied circumstances and emotional forces that led to the writer's suicide and exploring Pancake's influence on contemporary fiction generally and Appalachian writing in particular. Douglass has recreated the key events of the young artist's life: his West Virginia childhood, his romantic losses, his education as a writer at the University of Virginia, and the acceptance of his work by the East Coast literary establishment. Through analysis of the story fragments reproduced in this volume, including "The Conqueror" and "Shouting Victory, " Douglass illustrates the recurring themes - such as fear of failure and the inability to escape disaster - that Pancake expressed so eloquently in his work, and he shows their origins in the writer's own personal history. Douglass examines the degree to which Pancake drew on his memories of life in Appalachia and discusses Pancake's influence on other Appalachian writers such as Pinckney Benedict.

Genres: Biography

276 pages, Hardcover

First published February 4, 1998

Reviews

[Dustincecil · Rating 3 out of 5]

I dove straight into the second half of this book. Breece's letters to his mother were touching, and thoughtful, and provided a great (but short) snapshot into his research process, and personal interest. I wanted to see more of that, and possibly his mother's side of the letters too. Breece's mother seemed, also to have something to say. I would have rated this book higher, except for the (more than half) first portion of the book. I found it an overly academic, mostly unhelpful, over simplification of the "meat" of breece's letters. After reading this, I still want more, and am encouraged to re-read the Stories of Breece d'j Pancake.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating biography and selected letters of the talented, tortured Breece D'J Pancake. (The initials were adopted after appearing as a misprint in The Atlantic Monthly.) Interesting sketches of the class divisions in his native Virginia and the condescension Pancake felt he received from Peter Taylor and others.

[El]

There's a biography?! Thank you, New Yorker, for bringing this to my attention.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

A necessarily brief, yet somehow still redundant, biography of the great Appalachian writer Breece Pancake, Douglass's book kept me interested until he started in on some meaningless English major analysis of Pancake's stories. Most valuable are the letters and story fragments in the second section of the book. We see a disappearing era where writers not only killed themselves over every word of their fiction, but also wrote freewheeling letters to family and friends.

Notes:

Breece's respect for and deep connection to his home are apparent from his fiction, and are even more evident considering his relationship with his family. Breece never found a period of comfort and confidence in his considerable talents, which may have pushed him to refine his writing more intensely and quickly than most writers. Since Pancake's life was so short and his oeuvre so small, Douglass lapses into English major style analysis after quickly exhausting all of his biographical material.

Pancake's man letters and the few story fragments included here show his human side, the unvarnished thought that is certainly never present in his completed fiction. Reading letters like these reaffirms the importance of this type of low tech communication, its tendency to enrich the thought and relationships of letter-writers and its tendency toward fuller narratives. Email and texting have killed our families.

[Tommy Okuniewski]

To read a dead man's letters is unavoidably voyeuristic.

But having done so made me feel empathy for a young writer I would have otherwise had to guess through my impressions of his work.

I would hate to deify a tragic talent, but I'll always wish I could have known him.

There's no way around it: the last few letters will kill you. When it's over you realize there's nothing left, and that someone you know was real, someone you could almost say you felt acquainted with, ceased to be. And that will break your heart unlike any fiction. The feeling will be as real as the person who poured their heart out on these letters.

[Sheldon Compton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I borrowed this book from a friend years ago and still haven't returned it. I go back to it pretty often because I'm a massive fan of Pancake's. There's letters from him, unpublished and half-finished manuscripts, along with all the tropes you'd expect to find in a literary biography, just tons of stuff like that. It's the only biographical work on maybe the best writer to ever come out of Appalachia. It rocks it like a slut in bad shoes, basically.

[elderfoil...the whatever champion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super portrait of Pancake focusing on both his life and writing.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essays about Pancake and his work as well as a selection of letters. Enlightening, frustrating and invaluable. Pancake was and is the high mark for us hillbilly literature makers.