In the following excerpt, Blair provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Stuart's short stories.

In the following excerpt, Clark examines the role of religion in Stuart's short fiction.

In the following essay, Clarke explores Stuart's use of folklore in his short stories, contending that, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, Stuart provides an original, authentic voice to American literature.

In the following essay, Clarke perceives Stuart's use of local legend as "providing a felicitous vehicle for his perception of a changing society within a framework of timeless nature."

[In Trees of Heaven, Tarvin Bushman] is the ideal youngster with no faults and few complexities. Created simply, he is free to observe and make his own judgments. He has the adolescent qualities of wanting to find a mate and to establish his own identity independent of his parents. But throughout the story he thinks and reacts more as an adult than as an adolescent. Although Stuart's younger brother James is the physical model for Tarvin, many parallels might be drawn between Tarvin and the author&#x...

Although the Agrarian Movement was in its heyday while Stuart was a student at Vanderbilt, he had mixed emotions about the actual achievements of the group. As he says, he liked very much what the Agrarians were advocating, but not what they were doing: "Their farming was on paper. I went to one professor's home and he had a few tomatoes in a little garden and these plants were poorly cultivated. At my home, we farmed: we knew how to do it. We made a living and some to spare farming our Kentuc...

In the following essay, Wabnitz explores the role of suspense in Stuart's short stories.

In the following excerpt, Rohrberger discusses Stuart as a regionalist writer.

Stuart uses authentic regional dialect, faithfully rendering his time and place, combining his knowledge of life with imagination to create a unique literary expression…. Most of his characters are drawn from direct observation, sometimes lacking even the mask of a fictional name, and their speech is the speech Stuart has heard and used all his life. Although the reader who is unfamiliar with authentic Kentucky hill speech may feel that a rendition is exaggerated, careful examination suggests that St...

[When] a man writes honestly, without pretension or distortion, about the way people look, act, and think, he produces fiction that is believable and humor that is natural and organic. This is the essence of Jesse Stuart's humor: it is an element as basic to his works as the winds that blow through the beech trees of W-Hollow…. Stuart's humor emerges from his subject matter and is sustained by it. There are few quick laughs in his works. Rather, his humor evokes the constant amusement o...

In the following essay, Bode offers a mixed review of Plowshare in Heaven.

In Jesse Stuart's short story "This Farm for Sale" Dick Stone decides to sell out and move into town. He authorizes his old friend Melvin Spencer, a well-known local real estate agent, to sell his hill farm. Spencer is really a poet…. [In his advertisements he] describes the nuts and berries and other wild fruits growing on the Stone farm—the hazelnuts, elderberries, pawpaws, and persimmons—and the jellies and preserves Mrs. Stone makes from them. He describes the t...

In the following essay, written for the reprint of Stuart's Clearing in the Sky, Foster surveys the major themes of the collection.

In the following essay, Bogart discusses the universal appeal of Stuart's short fiction.

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

[Good] regional writing is always made at home. Jesse Stuart has written five books without going far beyond the borders of W-Hollow in his native Greenup County. Ten or twelve families live in the hollow, and he has written poems and stories about all of them. These real people behind his stories would make an interesting article in themselves. (p. 524) Stuart came into literature in 1934 with an amazing collection of 703 sonnets, Man with a Bull-Tongue Plow. Many of these poems were pure description, a re...

[Stuart has a distinct vision of life which permeates all of his novels.] There is the dark world…. It is the world which Stuart sees around him—Kentucky or Appalachia—but is representative of the universal and the characters who live in the dark world are universal men. The dark world is dead or is dying. And at this point the Stuart cycle begins. From the dark world, or the dying world, comes a world of light and all the symbolic overtones contained therein. But the world does not, ca...