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By Root 3022 0

Review, other good things happened. John Woodburn, an editor with Doubleday, Doran (as it was then), who was driving through the South on a scouting trip, stopped on The Southern Review's suggestion to see me, and left carrying some of my manuscripts with him. As was to be expected, a book publisher was not interested in a collection of short stories by an obscure young writer. But when Diarmuid Russell was opening his literary agency of Russell and Volkening, John Woodburn offered him the names of some new young writers he'd come across who might need an agent, among them mine. I became his client (I believe, his first), a decisive event in my writing life.

Diarmuid Russell's integrity was a clear stream proceeding undeflected and without a ripple on its own way through the fields of publishing. On his quick perception, his acute and steady judgment in regard to my work, as well as on his friendship, I relied without reservation. (When, presently, he sent back to me a story I'd written called "The Delta Cousins," saying that to him it looked like Chapter Two of a novel, I saw then where the story had come from and where it was going, and wrote my first novel, Delta Wedding.)

It was Diarmuid Russell's own belief in my work, and his hardheaded persistence in sending it out again and again when it was rejected, that resulted after a year's time in the acceptance of a story of mine in a magazine of general circulation. Edward Weeks took "A Worn Path" for The Atlantic Monthly in 1941. He had opened the door. Mary Louise Aswell, the fiction editor of Harper's Bazaar, who was a passionate advocate of new young writers, was able to clear the way for "The Key," the first of many of my stories she later introduced.

Diarmuid Russell was thus eventually able to interest a publisher in a first book of stories by a writer hardly known, true, but now in print. The publisher was Doubleday, Doran, and the book went straight into the shepherding of the same John Woodburn who a few years earlier had carried the manuscripts there. It was through his editorship that Katherine Anne Porter, once more to encourage me, out of her shining bounty introduced the book, A Curtain of Green.

John Woodburn, one of the great editors in a time of great ones, was a true champion of young writers; others writing today have him to thank as I do. When he moved to Harcourt, Brace (as it was then), I moved along with him.

The present collection holds all my published stories: those in A Curtain of Green and the three volumes that followed; and two that appear here for the first time in book form. In general, my stories as they've come along have reflected their own present time, beginning with the Depression in which I began; they came out of my response to it. These two written in the changing sixties reflect the unease, the ambiguities, the sickness and desperation of those days in Mississippi. If they have any special virtue in this respect, it would lie in the fact that they, like the others, are stories written from within. They come from living here—they were part of living here, of my long familiarity with the thoughts and feelings of those around me, in their many shadings and variations and contradictions.

"Where Is the Voice Coming From?" is unique, however, in the way it came about.

That hot August night when Medgar Evers, the local civil rights leader, was shot down from behind in Jackson, I thought, with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story—my fiction—in the first person: about that character's point of view, I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake. The story pushed its way up through a long novel I was in the middle of writing, and was finished on the same night the shooting had taken place. (It's only two pages long.) At The New Yorker, where it was sent and where it was taken for the immediately