ABSTRACT
Fred Chappell is a gifted philosophical writer, social critic, humorist, and, above all, a fine poet with a sharp talent for piquant vernacular dialogue and the imagery of nature. The farms created in Chappell's verse poem, Midquest and those of his own youth were small, and the cultivation of their hilly and rocky soil difficult. Emerging from a purgatorio in his fiction, Chappell rediscovered detached humor and the sharply comic natural imagery in the language of his family and neighbors who lived in the mountains. As an adolescent in Canton, Chappell felt trapped in a limited environment, and he and a friend, "Fuzz", formed a cabal against their parochial world. At Duke Chappell found friends like Reynolds Price who were also talented writers. Chappell occasionally writes from a "comic", Dantean perspective, which attempts to subsume all of the world's good and evil to a larger and desirable conclusion.
