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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 whose particular gift was at its highest level in that genre. Even his novels The House of Breath (1950), In a Farther Country (1955), Come, the Restorer (1974), and Arcadio (1983) are constructed of sections that tend to be the length of a short story and to have the emotional and rhetorical intensity and shape of that genre--a construction that is essential to Goyen's accomplishment in inventing new forms of the novel. The preoccupations of Goyen's stories distinguish them from those of other Southern writers and from regional writers in general, while his experiments with the genre distinguish his work from that of either the traditionalists or the more cerebral experimentalists (the "metafiction" writers) of the four decades following World War II.
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