William Goyen remains one of the most original and important American short-story writers of the twentieth century. Known also for his novels and plays, Goyen was a productive short-fiction writer whose particular gift was at its highest level in that...

William Goyen was born in Trinity, Texas, on 24 April 1915. Son of Charles Provine, a lumber salesman, and Mary Inez (Trow) Goyen, he writes of his very early years: "The world of that town, its countryside, its folk, its speech and superstition and...

What makes "Nests in a Stone Image" [in Ghost and Flesh] much more than an indulging of an all-too-writerly propensity to write about one's own writing is Goyen's use of imagery of the life of Jesus. The writer's vigil is patterned on Jesus' night of prayer and doubt in Gethsemane and overlaid with allusions to other aspects of his life. But "Nests in a Stone Image" is not updating of Jesus' story: the writer may agonize, but he is acutely aware...

[Goyen] differs markedly from his contemporaries in his lyrical, poetic translation of material into his imagined world. Mood finally supplants place. When the specifications of place and people fade, the violence becomes grotesqueness. The shadowy, elusive figures drop the forthrightness of violence and take on the half-lights, the mysteries, and the freakishness of the grotesque. Although their existence often seems other-worldly, these ghosts are related to the fear of crass industrialism and standardiza...

As befits an age of universal solitude, in which art often is about art, William Goyen's stories are a testament to the essentiality of telling. He regards such communication as a form of love, a process including seeing and saying: to tell one must know; once one knows he must tell. The teller devotes his life to shaping an "anxious shapelessness" into truth. (p. 77) The willingness to discipline himself in the use of language underlies his entire achievement as a writer. His stories r...