SOURCE: "Jesse Stuart's Stories of Old Kentucky Homes," in Washington Post Book World, Vol. 12, October 24, 1982, pp. 3, 13.

In the following essay, Paterson provides a positive review of The Best-Loved Short Stories of Jesse Stuart.

"They really brought men to justice back in them days when they had to have someone to hang every Sunday after church." This is a throwaway sentence buried in the middle of a paragraph about halfway through a story with the straightforward title: "Sunday Afternoon Hanging." Yet there is in this sentence the deviousness of a poet. It jars the mind from bend to bend like Donne's, "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone." But Jesse Stuart's prose has so much poetry in it that he often seems to throw away great lines. It is a trait of mountain people not to suspect that their ordinary speech rolls with the rhythm of the Psalms...