THE CIRCUS IN THE ATTIC

Kentucky and Tennessee provide the background for most of the fourteen stories that make up this collection — a sort of between the wars Winesburg, Ohio — or perhaps even closer in the types of characters and situations to a prose Spoon River Anthology. The title story and Prime Leaf are novelettes, — the first dealing with the dream life of a frustrated man whose one excursion into adventure in his boyhood, when he ran away to join a circus, is immortalized through his subsequent dull life, dominated by women, in the building of the circus in the attic. The twelve short stories are sketches, character bits, impressions, community cross sectioning, — stories that have been published over seventeen years by the Pulitzer Prize winner, author of All The King's Men.