Winner of the 1936 Pulitzer Prize as well as the Harper novel prize for his first novel, Honey in the Horn (1935), H. L. Davis was an unreliable source for the biographical details of his life. According to Robert Bain in his 1986 introduction to H. L. Davis: Collected Essays and Stories, the author “contributed to many distortions of the facts of his life.” While Davis may well have embellished his adventurous youth—his stories of working as a printer's devil at nine, a sheep tender at ten, a cattle herder and newspaper typesetter at eleven, and a deputy county sheriff at seventeen—he nevertheless learned much about these various occupations and portrayed them memorably, relying heavily also upon picaresque characterization, a true sense of place, and a remarkable knowledge of folklore. Davis's ability to deal creatively with the world certainly accounts at least in part for the rich background upon...