It’s the birthday of Breece D’J Pancake (1952-1979), or Breece Dexter John Pancake, who died at the age of 26 and whose 12 published short stories comprise his entire body of work. In a 1983 posthumous review of his collection The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake, Joyce Carol Oates called Pancake “a young writer of such extraordinary gifts that one is tempted to compare his debut to Hemingway’s…”

Pancake was born Breece Dexter Pancake in Cabell County, West Virginia, in the Appalachian Region, where most of his stories are set; he added “John” to his name when he converted to Catholicism in his mid-twenties. His parents were Clarence and Helen Pancake; Clarence died in 1975 of complications from MS, after years of working as a shipping clerk at Union Carbide. Pancake studied at West Virginia Wesleyan College and Marshall University, taught two years at a military academy, and then studied in the master’s writing program at the University of Virginia with the novelist John Casey. His lower class status made him a loner among his peers there, and he, like his father, had problems with alcohol. With Casey’s encouragement, he began having stories published in The Atlantic, beginning with “Trilobites” in 1977. At one point, a typesetter at The Atlantic mistakenly wrote his middle initials as “D’J” and Pancake decided not to correct it.

Pancake, who identified intimately with the beauty and hopelessness of the Appalachian Region, had occasionally made reference to an early death, and at some point he wrote to a friend, “If I weren’t a good Catholic, I’d consider getting a divorce from life.” He attended Mass on Palm Sunday just a few hours before he died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound; his suicide remains something of a mystery. In her review, Oates wrote, “But the stories—tense, elegiac, remorseless in their insistence on the past’s dominion over the present—argue for a sensibility so finely honed, so vulnerable to the inexorable passage of time, that it is likely death appeared as a solace” (Joyce Carol Oates, “From England to Brooklyn to West Virginia,” The New York Times, 1983).

Have a blessed Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.