SOURCE: "Tidewater Tales," in Sewanee Review, Spring, 1994, pp. xlix-li.

In this excerpt, West discusses the effect of Styron's revisions of these earlier published stories and notes that Styron's message is that art can redeem an otherwise intolerable existence.

It is good to see these stories made available between hard covers, but one would be mistaken to regard this small collection as a simple recycling of already-published work. The stories need to be read together, in the achronological sequence in which Styron has arranged them, if one is to experience their collective force. A Tidewater Morning is a small, carefully crafted volume of fiction that most closely resembles, in technique, such fictive sequences as Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and Hemingway's In Our Time. Styron has linked his stories together in ways obvious and subtle: this arrangement gives them a cumulative weight and thematic resonance that they would not possess...