A Tidewater morning, three tales from youth / William Styron

In each of these three stories, which orignally appeared in Esquire magazine in the Seventies and Eighties, narrator Paul Whitehurst recalls significant episodes from his childhood in Virginia during the Depression and the Second World War. In ``Love Day,'' Paul remembers his father's analysis of the economic benefits the war has brought to the South, as he himself sails to Japan with the invasion fleet. In ``Shadrach,'' a dying former slave returns to the rundown plantation where he was born. In the title story, Paul commemorates his mother's agonizing death from cancer. The narratives, as Styron says in a preface, ``reflect the experiences of the author,'' as well as recapitulate, in luminous prose, most of the major themes of his longer fiction, from Set This House on Fire (1951) to Sophie's Choice (1981). For all its brevity, this collection is arguably the best single-volume introduction to this important author.