Pinckney Benedict
Biographical Information
Born in Lewisburg, Pinckney Benedict grew up on his family's dairy farm, learning the voice of the mountains and of the people strong enough, or strange enough, to survive there. Though he left at age thirteen to attend a private prep school near Philadelphia, Pinckney Benedict never lost his sense of West Virginia, both as a home and as a source of inspiration. He attended Princeton University, studying under novelist Joyce Carol Oates. Oates encouraged him to write about West Virginians, and to incorporate their dialect. Also at Oates' urging, he studied the works of West Virginia writer Breece D'J Pancake, whose stories employ a laconic style.
Pinckney Benedict published his first short story collection, Town Smokes in 1987. The collection included "The Sutton Pie Safe," a short story that had won the Chicago Tribune's annual Nelson Algren Award. The stories in the collection helped to build Benedict's reputation for visceral and violent tales, including a piece about a young man who kills his sick dog with a .45 pistol and a piece about a mother who awakens her son in the middle of the night to save his drunken stepfather from an enraged moonshiner. Town Smokes received excellent reviews, including one from Richard Panek from the Chicago Tribune Books, who wrote that Benedict's "lyricism never plays his flinty characters false."
Five years later, Benedict published his second short story collection, The Wrecking Yard and Other Stories. The stories in this collection center on one theme -- the confrontation between so-called ordinary folks and outsiders. Like Town Smokes, Wrecking Yard contains often brutal violence that has its own beauty. Douglas Glover explains that Benedict "is at his best when he ignores the contemporary siren call of sentimental realism and interpersonal sensitivity and simply lets the violence overflow, propelling the reader into a world of strange and macabre beauty."
Two years later, in 1994, Benedict published his first novel, Dogs of God. In a scene drawn in the stark West Virginia mountains, the psychopathic Tannhauser, a backwoodsman turned drug lord, rules as the savage overlord of an abandoned resort he has turned into an impregnable fortress. Challenge to his authority appears in the form of Goody, an itinerant bare-knuckle fighter too proud to accept Tannhauser's rule. Caught in the struggle for supremacy is a collection of gunrunners, drifters, corrupt local lawmen, enslaved illegal immigrants, and a woman whose wanton sexuality is as unpredictably dangerous as a double-edged sword.
As they had Benedict's earlier works, critics praised Dogs of God. Benedict earned special praise for his "odd characters and creatures driven by primal, irrefutable urges." Like his short stories, Benedict's Dogs of God has a brutal honesty and a dark realism. Joyce Carol Oates provided perhaps the most telling comment on Dogs of God when she said, "Pinckney, you're going to set the tourist industry in West Virginia back one hundred years." Benedict had a simple reply: "I may have a vested interest in keeping the tourists out."
In addition to these, his best-known works, Pinckney Benedict has contributed numerous short stories and essays to various publications and has written several one-act, full-length, and musical plays. His short story "Miracle Boy" was included in the 1999 anthology Prize Stories: The O.Henry Awards. Pinkney Benedict is currently teaching at Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.
Critical Responses
It is interesting to note that Pinckney Benedict seems to be more appreciated by critics outside the region than he is in West Virginia, or Appalachia as a whole. His work has been praised by Eudora Welty and Joyce Carol Oates and by reviewers in the New York Times. However, critics writing in Appalachian Journal have questioned whether Benedict is a true Appalachian, suggesting that he perpetuates stereotypes about the region.
However, since Benedict sometimes depicts lower-class West Virginians as trashy and violent, his fiction has evoked spirited responses from critics outside and inside Appalachia. Reviewing Town Smokes for the New York Times, Diane McWhorter calls Benedict's depiction of West Virginia "a hell ride across the hindmost gullies and hooch-sodden hills of an American inferno". McWhorter finds the settings violent and squalid and the characters defeated and destructive: "amid the familiar moonshine stills, dog pits and junked cars in front of every double-wide trailer are creatures who have reached adulthood too broken to bond with anything more demanding than a bottle of beer."
Articles in the Appalachian Journal reveal how critics from the region charge Benedict with perpetuating stereotypes about Appalachia. Angela B. Freeman worries that critics and readers outside the region unquestioningly accept Benedict's fiction as current images of West Virginia and its inhabitants, in which rural equals poor, and rural inevitably mutates into backwardness and violence. Bob Henry Baber argues that Benedict for the most part preys upon an Appalachian underclass that he knows only enough about to denigrate. Similarly, John Alexander Williams argues that Benedict's portrayals of mountain character and behavior are formulaic. Freeman suggests that Benedict is not authentically Appalachian or that he and fellow West Virginia writer Breece Pancake are guilty of exaggerating their Appalachianness.
Works Published
Novels:
Dogs of God
Story Collections:
Town Smokes
The Wrecking Yard
Selected Bibliography
Baber, Bob Henry. My Exhilerating [sic], Self-Destructive, and Near-Criminal Candidacy for the Governorship of West Virginia. Appalachian Journal 24 (1997): 368-419.
Benedict, Pinckney. Interview. By Thomas E. Douglass. Appalachian Journal 20 (1992): 68-74.
Douglass, Thomas E. Breece Pancake and the Problem with Place: A West Virginia State of Mind. Appalachian Journal 22 (1994): 60-77.
Freeman, Angela B. The Origins and Fortunes of Negativity: The West Virginia Worlds of Kromer, Pancake, and Benedict. Appalachian Journal 25 (1993): 244-69.
McWhorter, Diane. Cigarettes Rolled from the Bible. Rev. of Town Smokes. New York Times Book Review 12 July 1987: 13.
Miller, Jim Wayne. New Generation of Savages Sighted in West Virginia. Appalachian Heritage 16 (1988): 28-33.
Williams, John Alexander. Unpacking Pinckney in Poland. Appalachian Journal 20 (1993): 162-77.
Author Website
none available