William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic, Graham Greene wrote: “It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes.” After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short stories—his “Pearl County” series—inspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama.

Come in at the Door is the first in March’s “Pearl County” collection, and it tells the story of Chester, a boy who lives with his withholding, widowed father, and Mitty, who keeps house and serves as a surrogate wife to Chester’s father and a mother to Chester. One morning before dawn, Mitty takes Chester to the Athlestan courthouse to watch the hanging of a man who’d killed “a grotesque, dwarflike creature” he thought had “laid a conjure” on him.
 
Throughout Chester’s rambunctious young manhood, the gruesome memory hovers just below the surface of his mind, recalled in detail only at his father’s death, when the book sweeps forward to its shattering denouement. A classic of Southern Gothic that illuminates family, class, race, and gender, Come in at the Door marks the homecoming of a Southern storyteller at the peak of his craft.

William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic, Graham Greene wrote: "It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes." After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short stories–his "Pearl County" series–inspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. The University of Alabama Press is pleased to be bringing these three novels back into print.

Third in the "Pearl County" series, The Looking-Glass is March's story of a small Alabama town in the early days of the twentieth century. Connected by relationships that bind, support, and strangle, the citizens of Reedyville are drawn ineluctably toward a single climactic night. March's skillful blend of humor and pathos evinces his deep insights and empathy into the problems of the mind and heart that are both peculiar to Reedyville yet found in every town and family.

William March's debut novel, Company K, introduced him to the reading public as a gifted writer of modern fiction. Of that World War I classic, Graham Greene wrote: "It is the only war book I have read which has found a new form to fit the novelty of the protest. The prose is bare, lucid, without literary echoes." After Company K, March brought his same unerring style to a cycle of novels and short stories–his "Pearl County" series–inspired in part by his childhood in the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama. The University of Alabama Press is pleased to be bringing these three novels back into print.

In The Tallons, the second novel in the "Pearl County" series, March tells the story of two farm boys, Andrew and Jim Tallon. Their placid and predictable life is upended by a girl from Georgia, Myrtle Bickerstaff. The conflict which engulfs these three arises from a series of carefully chosen and extraordinarily telling incidents to a dramatic climax which will be remembered long after the book is set aside. March framed the novel as "a study in paranoia" and to the end of his life considered it one of his strongest works.

  The Collected Short Stories of William March

“Described by José Garcia Villa as America’s ‘greatest short story writer,’ by Alistair Cooke as the ‘the unrecognized genius of our time,’ and by his biographer as ‘one of the most remarkable, talented, and shamefully neglected writers that America has pro- duced,’ William March (1893–1954) is remembered, if at all, for The Bad Seed, which March ironically regarded as his worst work. The emphasis in The Two Worlds of William March is on the literary career, and we get a fairly full picture of a hardworking, oversensitive, compassionate bachelor, who suffered a tragic breakdown late in life . . . [and] whose best long works, Company K and The Looking-Glass, as well as March himself are almost forgotten. . . . Simmonds’s comprehensive, scholarly, and sympathetic study may redress this unwarranted neglect.” —CHOICE

Providing an exhaustive compendium of publications by and citations about Alabama-born writer William March, William March: An Annotated Checklist offers an invaluable resource that traces in meticulous detail the arc of March’s writing, the popular and critical reception of his books and novels, and the abundant scholarship and criticism about March and his oeuvre.
 
This deeply researched reference includes both primary materials, an exhaustive checklist of the forms and editions of each of March’s works, and secondary materials, which include plays and films adapted from March’s writing, biographical and critical articles, doctoral dissertations, and contemporary reviews of March’s work.
 
The reissue in 2015 of the novels in his Pearl County series—Come in at the Door, The Tallons, and The Looking-Glass—is part of a fresh wave of interest in March, one of the most influential American writers from the mid-1930s until his death in 1954.