Larry Brown, as you’re about to see, wrote about human frailties. He wrote about people whose lives have come to feel stunted, or unmoored, and who find themselves unable or unwilling to resist perilous impulses: for sex, for alcohol, for violence, for numbness, for the kind of crazed love that doubles as a wrecking ball, even for art. He wrote about people in dire straits—emotional, financial, romantic, existential—who often choose, with varying levels of awareness, to make things more dire: to burn it all down, in some cases; in others, just to feel a new kind of heat. Among Larry’s many strengths as a writer, maybe foremost, was a kind of negative capability: He never flinched. His characters flowed onto the page without dilution or filtering, their defects left intact—their confusions, bigotries, lusts, fears, cruelties, all the sediment of their weaknesses. That’s one reason, aside from deadline glibness, that reviewers sometimes likened his stories’ effects to moonshine’s: they burn, they bite, they leave a scalded sensation in your chest. Larry never sought for us to admire his characters, or even to side with them; but he refused to let us scorn or pity them either. What he asked us to afford them was the same thing he applied, rigorously, to their creation: unsparing empathy. The source of his achievement, I think, is this very empathy—his clear and tender regard for human frailties, his adherence to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s assertion that both good and bad people are invariably less so than they seem. It also happens to be the one thing he didn’t have to teach himself when, in the autumn of 1980, he decided to become a writer.

Not that he set out to write about the broad spectrum of human frailties in Lafayette County, Mississippi—not at first, anyway, and not at second either. No, after lugging Mary Annie’s old typewriter into their bedroom that autumn, Larry Brown set out to write about a man-eating bear terrorizing Yellowstone National Park. The ambition, then, was merely to earn some extra money, but with his mind instead of his hands.