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 count...
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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 who...
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Critical Essay by E. R. Curtius
Alive in William Goyen is a primal affinity with the first things of creation…. He has the keen senses of the woodsman, whom no creak or rustle can elude. He re...
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Critical Essay by Louise Y. Gossett
[Goyen] differs markedly from his contemporaries in his lyrical, poetic translation of material into his imagined world. Mood finally supplants place. When the spe...
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Critical Essay by David Dillon
The adjectives lyrical and poetic have often been applied to William Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath. They are not so misleading as most critical cachet...
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Critical Essay by Jay S. Paul
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 c...
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Critical Essay by Jay S. Paul
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 writ...
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Critical Essay by Robert Phillips
[The Collected Stories of William Goyen] is the book William Goyen has been writing all his career. A born storyteller, even his four novels (The House of Breath, In...
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(Charles) William Goyen
Critical Essay by E. R. Curtius
