Breece D'J Pancake
Biographical Information
It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of Breece D'J Pancake to modern Appalachian fiction, despite the shortness of his life (he died two months before his twenty-seventh birthday) and the fact that before he died he had published only a few short stories. The publication of his single collection of stories, four years after his death, sparked renewed national interest in regional literature and helped writers like Denise Giardina, Richard Currey, and Pinckney Benedict to find national audiences and critical attention. His style and power have been compared to such twentieth-century literary giants as William Faulkner, James Joyce, Flannery O'Connor, and Samuel Beckett. But who was this brilliant and troubled young man, who made such an impact on the literary world with his life and death?
Breece Pancake was raised in Milton, WV, a small town in Cabell County. He briefly attended West Virginia Wesleyan College, then moved on to Marshall University, where he completed a B.A. in English in 1974. He spent the next two years as an English instructor at Fort Union Military Academy and Staunton Military Academy. He left teaching in 1976 to enroll in the masters program at the University of Virginia. At UVA, Pancake began to write fiction, seriously and prolifically. His first published story, Trilobites, appeared in The Atlantic in 1977. This event would bestow on him the unusual middle initials D'J, a ms-punctuation by the Atlantic editors of the initials for "Dexter" (his middle name), and "John" (the name he adopted after his conversion to Catholicism in his mid-twenties). Pancake chose to adopt the misprint and used it afterwards on all his published works.
But despite finding publication success, and earning the respect and friendship of his professors, Pancake did not have an easy time at UVA. In his Foreword to The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake, James Alan McPherson writes about the University's struggle to reconcile its new make-up -- a generation after the admission of middle-class males and less than a decade after the admission of women and minorities -- with its "traditional" upper-class Southern identity. In this struggle, Pancake, like others from the Southern middle- and lower-classes, felt "isolated and insecure." Pancake did not fit in well with other graduate students at the university, though many admired his work. He seemed to deliberately cultivate a "hillbilly" persona, rough and unkempt, telling people of his "poor" origins, though his parents were in fact closer to the middle class than to the poverty and roughness of the people whose lives he captured. He lived in a single room equipped with a shower that was attached to a larger home in a wealthy suburb outside of Charlottesville. The room contained little furniture; he slept on a cot and wrote at a desk placed under the room's only window. His personal relationships tended to be private and intense, Pancake bringing the same passion to his life that he did to his writing.
Breece D'J Pancake died on the night of April 8, 1979, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. His death was officially judged a suicide, though some family members and childhood friends believe his death was a tragic accident. Others friends, including UVA faculty member John Casey, believe that they received "suicide" notes from Pancake in the weeks before his death, notes only understandable through hindsight. Whatever the true reasons behind it, Breece Pancake's death was a huge blow to the Appalachian literary community. All those who read his work believed he was on the cusp of a brilliant career, full of promise and potential. Though that potential was in many ways unfulfilled, Breece D'J Pancake lives on -- in the lives he touched, the work he left behind, and the influence he has exerted on the Appalachian writers that would follow him.
Critical Responses
From the moment that "Trilobites" was first published by The Atlantic in 1977, Breece Pancake captured the attention of readers. When his collected stories were published in 1983, the first hardcover printing sold over 15,000 copies in the first six months. The collection was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and named an American Library Association Notable Book for 1983. Literary critics rushed to compare the young writer to modern literary giants and to rediscover so-called "regional literature."
Critics have noted the very "Appalachianness" of Pancake's work, the strong sense of place and of identity to be found in his characters. In Pancake's stories, it is almost impossible to separate person and place; setting is not a location, it is a part of personhood. The characters in Pancake's fiction are who they because of where they are; their identities forged iron in the coal-filled mountains that surround them, often creating a prison of expectations, frustrated dreams and resentments. David Stevens, in his analysis of the works of Pancake and of Nova Scotia-born Alistair MacLeod, writes that
It is not surprising that [they] . . . should focus so often and intently on the dilemma of male characters coming of age within the regional community, characters who must make the impossible decision to stay or leave. Admittedly repulsed by their parents' harsh lifestyles was well as the decline of the surrounding landscape, such young men cannot escape their devotion to family and community either, recognizing as they do the components of their own identities that only the region can supply.
This understanding of the interconnectedness of person and place -- of the conflict between the regional identity and the outside worked -- extends even through time and space. The past is always present, in the now and in the tomorrow; the dead never cease to make demands of the living. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Pancake's stories as "tense, elegiac, remorseless in their insistence on the past's domain over the present." Pancake's characters can never escape the past, the generations who have come before; instead, they must carry these lost generations with them into the future, whatever and wherever that may be. There is no "right" choice for Pancake's protagonists -- no option that offers a happy ending or hopeful future. Instead, there is only a kind of resigned, almost bitter, awareness that, for them, happiness isn't really an option and the future is not really bright.
This spiritual and mental darkness, this overshadowing of the soul, reveals an autobiographical aspect of Pancake's work; like his male protagonists, Breece Pancake was a man caught between two worlds--his awareness of his West Virginia roots and the world he encountered at the University of Virginia -- but never truly a part of either -- separated, physically, mentally, and emotionally from the land and the heritage it represents, but yet unable to fit "outside" because of that heritage.
Writing in Appalachian Journal, Ellesa Clay High summarized Pancake's work best when she wrote described the tone that pervades Pancake's fiction -- "a tired grief laced with bitter energy, a depression as pervasive as coal dust, embedding itself under the skin."
Works Published
The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake
Selected Bibliography
Boller, Frances. Breece D'J Pancake. http://athena.english.vt.edu/~appalach/writersM/pancake.html.
Cochrane, Ashley. Breece D'J Pancake tells of personal strife at the University. The Cavalier Daily. March 2, 1995.
Douglass, Thomas E. A Room Forever: The Life, Work, and Letters of Breece D'J Pancake. Knoxville: University of Tennesse Press, 1998.
--. The Story of Breece D'J Pancake. Appalachian Journal. 17:4, Summer 1990. pp. 376-390.
Finnegan, Brian. Road stories that stay home: car and driver in Appalachia and 'The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake. The Southern Literary Journal. 29:2, Spring 1997. pp.87+.
Hugh, Ellesa Clay. A Lost Generation: The Appalachia of Breece D'J Pancake. Appalachian Journal. 13:1, Fall 1985. pp.34-40.
Kadohata, Cynthia. Breece D'J Pancake. Mississippi Review. 1996.
Snyder, Bob. Pancake and Benedict. Appalachian Journal. 15:3, Spring 1988. pp. 276-283.
Stevens, David. Writing region across the border: two stories of Breece Pancake and Alistair MacLeod. Studies in Short Fiction. 33:2, Spring 1996. pp. 263+.
Author Website
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