Breece Pancake

Breece Pancake was a tall, nice-looking guy with straw-blond hair. He loved to hike, hunt, fish, drive the back roads in his old Volkswagen, hang out at low-class joints playing pool or pinball, drink beer and engage in all-night bull sessions. Although many were drawn to him, he really wasn't close to anybody. He always seemed alienated from any social situation.

John Casey, one of his professors at the University of Virginia said of him:

He must have had an enormous concentration at an early age. He had a very powerful sense of things. Almost all of his stories are set in the part of West Virginia he came from, and he knew that from top to bottom. He knew people's jobs, from the tools they used to how they felt about them. He knew the geology, the per-history, and the history of the territory, not as a pastime, but as such a deep part of himself that he couldn't help dreaming of it...He worked as hard at his writing as anyone I've known or known about. I've seen the pages of notes, the sketches, the numbers of drafts, the fierce marginal notes to himself to expand this or contract that. And, of course, the final versions, as hard and brilliant worn as train rails.

- from the "Afterword" to Pancake's Stories

Breece Dexter Pancake was born on June 29, 1952, in Milton, West Virginia, the son of Clarence "Wicker" Pancake and Helen Frazier Pancake. His father was a shipping clerk for a Union Carbide plant who overcame a drinking problem only to succumb to Multiple Sclerosis. Breece had two sisters, both considerably older than he. In the 1980s one was a legal secretary in Santa Fe, and the other a nurse in Minneapolis. After her children were raised, Breece's mother took a job at the Milton Public Library in 1976, retiring in 1985 to Silver Springs, Florida.

Breece attended college at both West Virginia Wesleyan and Marshall University, graduating in 1974 from Marshall. When he left school he spent some time out West, visiting his sister in Santa Fe and getting a feel for the territory. He applied for teaching jobs and accepted one at Fort Union Military Academy in Western Virginia, perhaps drawn there because his favorite singer, Phil Ochs, had gone to school there.

In 1975 Breece Pancake's father died, as did one of his closest friends. Not long afterwards, Breece converted to Catholicism. The next year, Breece taught at the Staunton Military Academy and began taking writing courses at the University of Virginia. During the summer of 1976 he was a short order cook at the Penn Park Golf Course near Charlottesville, but in 1977 he received a prestigious Hoyns Fellowship and became a teaching assistant at the University of Virginia.

That same year the Atlantic Monthly accepted the story many still consider his best, "Tribolites," for publication. When the galleys came back for him to proof-read, a typographical error had changed his middle initial into "D'J"--a designation he affected for the rest of his published work.

As a graduate student, Breece took courses, taught freshman English, criticized submissions to the Virginia Quarterly Review, and saw more stories accepted by prestigious publications. He had also begun to job hunt in anticipation of receiving his Masters Degree in June of 1979. Then, on Palm Sunday night, April 7, 1979, Breece began drinking and, for some inexplicable reason, broke into a neighbor's house. When the residents returned and heard Breece stir, he ran back to his own house, placed a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Breece Pancake was dead at the age of 26.