Yet Larry Brown’s ascent, from his humble, almost impetuous start to his eventual rank among the vanguard of American realists, wasn’t quite so improbable as some observers have characterized it. The idea of fiction writers as trained professionals—all but licensed by the nation’s guild of MFA programs—is a relatively recent one. The writers with whom Larry was most familiar in 1980—Jack London, Zane Grey, Stephen King, even William Faulkner—had essentially done what he was setting out to do: taught themselves to write while supporting themselves with other jobs, channeling their imaginations into words, and, consequently, themselves into a new and more vivid life. “I had one burning thought that I believed was true,” he later wrote. “If I wrote long enough and hard enough, I’d eventually learn how.”

This is where, in the cinema version, you’d see the writer at his desk. Fingers clacking typewriter keys. Wadded-up paper overflowing a trash can, cigarette butts clumped in an ashtray. (Larry’s editor, Shannon Ravenel, once told me she could tell immediately when a manuscript of Larry’s entered her office—the smell of Marlboro smoke, even through the envelope, would herald its delivery.) Through a window you’d glimpse the seasons passing: the steel-colored Mississippi winter morphing into the yellowy-green dog days of summer. Maybe a calendar on the wall, its pages blowing off as in old-timey films. But the typewriter, in that scene, as in Larry’s life, wouldn’t ever stop clacking.

Larry wrote ghost stories, Westerns, Civil War stories, African hunting tales, and detective stories. He wrote tongue-in-cheek outdoors instruction (under the pen name Uncle Whitney) and essays about gun safety, coon hunting, and lingerie. In the meantime he tried enrolling, as a special student, in a one-semester writing class at the University of Mississippi. When the instructor, the novelist Ellen Douglas, asked if he’d written anything before, he said yes ma’am—three novels and about a hundred short stories. (“Come to class,” she told him.) Through Douglas he discovered Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Ambrose Bierce, and Flannery O’Connor—and also the existence of a bookstore on the Oxford town square, which he’d somehow failed to notice. Its owner, Richard Howorth, added Raymond Carver and Harry Crews and Cormac McCarthy to Larry’s self-styled syllabus. Season by season, book by book, the scope of Larry’s ambition began broadening, his determination hardening all the while. “Know this,” he wrote to Lish. “I pump a fire truck ten days a month but that ain’t my life’s work. Writing is. And nothing has happened yet to make me change my mind.”