Breece Pancake was a young man of lowerclass origins from West Virginia, who went to the University of Virginia to study writing. At age 27, he ended his life, leaving behind these 12 stories. They reflect the occupations and preoccupations of the people he grew up with: mining, farming, crewing a riverboat, hunting, and carousing, among others. Idiom-filled, belyingly simple (with devastating understatements), Pancake's prose is as taut and mighty as flexed muscle.