Pattern of a Man

Fiction. First published in 1976, with a 2001 afterword by Wendell Berry. James Still was born on Double Creek in Alabama, one of ten children. For most of his life he lived in a log house at the forks of Troublesome and Wolfpen creeks in Knott County, Kentucky. The unique native dialect of the Kentucky mountains informs the language of all his stories. "Not many writers have been able to concentrate so much power into a few pages. When you look up from `The Nest' or `The Scrape,' you find the room filled with afterimages...Because, perhaps, of its artistic integrity this body of work never exploits or condescends to its subject, a region that has been condescended to and exploited almost by convention"--Wendell Berry.