Ward Allison Dorrance
Auteur van Three Ozark streams; log of the Moccasin and the Wilma
Werken van Ward Allison Dorrance
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A Scribners gift from M.E.P. to Eliz. Lemmon August, 1942 About a boy on the family farm in Missouri.
Statistieken
- Werken
- 7
- Leden
- 13
- Populariteit
- #774,335
- Waardering
- 4.0
- Besprekingen
- 2
- ISBNs
- 1
She clearly hadn't read past the first story, skimming for quotes and images among the other seven and wondering if this fifty bucks was really worth the headache.
The White Hound brings the sad tale of the City Mouse visiting the Country Mice he's kin to all unlooked-for on either side.
It's full of the antiquated race relations one would expect from a story by a forty-ish Southern writer published in the 1940s. It's equally aware of its antiquated setting...Ronald's visiting from New York, muses idly on how strange the visit is since this world ought by rights to have disappeared like his own corner of it had...the blood sports and the terrible child psychology and the overarching sense of defensiveness, of awareness of and simultaneous reveling in the unfairness of their shared privilege, ultimately demanding a blood sacrifice from them all. 3.5 sars
The Devil on a Hot Afternoon is a Ward Dorrance midcentury Southern Gothic about a world I remember very vaguely, very indistinctly. Miss Tatie Willoughby is seventy-six as we meet her. It's a very hot summer afternoon, her guardians...nephew and wife...are off into town for some fun. When their two children sneak out (their, um, nanny Rose being prone to nap during the hot part of the day) and Miss Tatie spies 'em headin' for the creek, she follows.
Nothing too much happens, except the town drunk and his, errrmmm, informal consort Indian Belle have a set-to and she beats him to death. In front of the children. And Miss Tatie. None of whom make a sound, help him out, or say a word about it when they get home. The event is, of course, reported; Miss Tatie's nephew's the landowner, they're his tenants, and besides the need to gossip's built in to humans.
No one finds out that there were witnesses. The lies in the story spread by Indian Belle will go unchallenged. Miss Tatie, who isn't quite right, if you see what I mean, thinks about her catfish, and weeps.
[The Best American Short Stories 1956: and the Yearbook of the American Short Story] has this story in it, too. I remembered that this was a weird and very unsettling story from the collection and made me wonder what the hell kind of person [Martha Foley] was, to choose something so despicable to be a best of. Reading it at 63, I am still left wondering that, only with the tenor changed from "who would do that?" to "why did anyone think this was okay?" 3 stars… (meer)