SOURCE: “The Intolerable Wrestle,” in Modern Age, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter, 1972, pp. 109-11.

In the following review of A Walk to the River, Buffington discusses Hoffman's Southern concerns and prose style, finding shortcomings in the novel's dramatization.

William Hoffman is one of the writers indicted in Floyd C. Watkins’ The Death of Art: Black and White in the Recent Southern Novel (University of Georgia Press, 1970). Professor Watkins’ thesis, simple to argue, is that the fictions of Hoffman, Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Spencer, Harper Lee, Jesse Hill Ford, Peter S. Feibleman, and others, including even William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren in some of their late work, fail both on the side of truth and on the side of art in their representations of the South according to liberal stereotypes. Hoffman’s first novel, Trumpet Unblown, is an example, says Watkins, of the way these writers “usually reject the entire Southern...