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 was born in 1893 as William Edward Campbell in Mobile, Alabama, and grew up in the picturesque hamlets of coastal Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. He won fame for his World War I novel Company K, whose success allowed him to devote himself to writing a large body of remarkable short fiction and novels that illuminate early twentieth-century southern life. 

“William March is one of the world’s classic modern writers, a whole ionosphere above Faulkner, and the unrecognized genius of our time.”
—Alistair Cooke, A William March Omnibus

“The outstanding virtues of March’s work are those of complete lack of sentimentality and routine romanticism, of a dramatic gift constantly heightened and sharpened by eloquence of understatement.”
—New York Times