I bought this book sight-unseen as a gift for my 77-year old mother since she lives not so far from Mr. Stuart's neck of the woods and I thought she would enjoy it (I'd read several on Mr. Stuart's short stories when I was going to school). One minor comment: while the text certainly isn't 'phone book' tiny, I wish they'd used a larger text and made two volumes out of it if necessary. Still, I don't want to be too critical of a good effort, so I'll give it 4. Mr. Stuart was quite an inspiration to the teachers in my hometown of Clarksville, Tennessee.

The collection of Porters stories reveals he own life as well. "The Jilting of Granny Whetherall," "Maria Concepcion," and "The Martyr," all express the pain and hard times that Porter herself has gone through.

Robert Penn Warren, The Circus in the Attic (Dell, 1947)

The back jacket of the book says, "These stories come from the pen of one of America's half-dozen great writers." Given the time period of the book's release, that was really saying something. Something accurate, but something nonetheless. Penn Warren (who won the Pulitzer two year's before for All the King's Men) wrote the stories in this book over the course of fifteen years. Most were previously published.

The book is framed with two novellas, the title story and "Prime Leaf," with a number of shorter works in between. As with most of Penn Warren's work, the tales are about depression-era and WW2-era life in the American south, people going on about their day-to-day business. A number of the stories deal with the same town, and the same characters pass in and out of them, so the reader gets the feeling of getting to know different aspects of the town as he goes from story to story.

Part of the magic of Penn Warren's work is the ability to simultaneously expose to the reader the quiet dignity of the proletariat and the basic stupidity of human nature. Not an easy thing to make the reader respect the people he's laughing at. But that's exactly what happens time and again in this book. The characters do dumb things for various reasons, but we always understand what those reasons are, and most of the time we can see how the character gets from the reason to the justification to the act without a problem. And while there's always a moral to be had, Robert Penn Warren is certainly not Aesop. The moral is there, waiting to be found, but the reader who's not interested in the morality of the tales is allowed to go off on his merry way and not contemplate the deeper meaning of what's here. That, too, is part of Robert Penn Warren's gift. *** 1/2

I have been a fan of Warren's writing for many years. He is known for his novels, yet in many of those the most poignant and moving parts are the inserts, the chapters placed there to highlight the main story. Cass Mastern evokes so much, that it is impossible to imagine AKM without it. Warren achieves much the samee here...while not every story is a masterpiece, at least 2, The Circus in the Attic, and Blackberry Winter, will linger long in the memory. These are stories of a different era, slow, warm, evocative, suggestive and delightful.

Though it has now been almost 30 years since I last spent a fall afternoon cutting tobacco, spearing the stalks onto wooden staves, and hanging the staves into the curing barn, I still remember the smell of the plants, the stickiness of the resin, the glint of the cutting and spearing tools. This tenuous link to a much earlier time, the time of the tobacco wars that rocked rural Kentucky and Tennessee just before WWII, provided me with just a sliver of insight to the hard times Robert Penn Warren depicts in his first novel, Night Rider.

The protagonist, Percy Munn, is an affable but pliable young lawyer, happily married with a growing law practice when he is drawn into supporting "The Association," an ardent band of tobacco farmers, including doctors, politicians, and other men whom "Perse" admires and who in turn admire him for his oratory skills, leadership, and status. Percy, himself a tobacco farmer, and the association work to break the economic monopoly exerted by the big tobacco companies (those bastards were evil well before they started lying to the public about the addictive nature of their deadly products). But when legal and ethical means are not enough, the collective leadership starts down a slippery slope of coercing nonassociation members to join or else face the consequences. Bands of "night riders" fan out across countryside, first destroying the crops of those who refused their entreaties to join up, then property, until even the taking of human life is justified as a means to their end once they have made the decision to torch the tobacco warehouses in Bardsville and the other towns in the vicinity.

Percy Munn finds himself at the center, and as other men whom he admired peel off from The Association because their moral bearing will not allow their continued participation, Percy eventually finds himself cut off from his wife; men such as Capt. Todd whom he greatly admired; Lucille Christian, the woman who tries to save him from himself; and eventually the leaders of The Association who let him take a fall for something he did not do.

The story is properly characterized as a tragedy even though Percy Munn is not as noble a central figure as one might expect. His great weakness is that he attaches himself to causes without much thought of the consequences. In other words, he is an idealist, but a flawed one. Though Percy's fall is in part caused by his flaws, a series of betrayals---sometimes he is the betrayer and other times he is betrayed---also conspire against him. When loyalty becomes more a currency than a principal, tragedy is inevitable.

Robert Penn Warren captures the speech and mannerisms of this main characters effectively, but he does not develop three-dimensional characters, with the exception of Willie Proudfit, the hard-scrabble, nearly destitute farmer who is something of a mystic who lives life fully and with a fervor Perse cannot experience as he continues his spiral inward. The landscape and settings seem more like those rendered by wood cuttings rather than a photograph. Some of Robert Penn Warren's digressions meander for pages without bolstering the story, and at times the allegorical and naturalistic elements of the novel seem at war with one another.

If permitted, I might rate this novel three and a half stars. Reading Night Rider is a worthwhile book for wintertime reading, butit is not the finest work by the author who was to become the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

I am a student who was assigned to read this book. The best part of reading it was not the actual reading but the reflection on the various meanings conveyed by the stories. It took me a very long time to read because most of the stories required that you read between the lines to understand the full meaning of the story. Overall, an average book