Breece D'J Pancake

The song "River Towns", from Dire Straits' frontman Mark Knopfler's 2015 studio album Tracker, was inspired by Pancake's "A Room Forever", the story of a tugboat mate spending New Year's Eve in an eight-dollar-a-night hotel room where he drinks cheap whiskey out of the bottle and eventually ends up with a teen-aged prostitute.

Pancake published six short stories in his lifetime, mostly in The Atlantic. These stories and six more that had not been published at the time of his death were collected in The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake (1983). The volume was reprinted in 2002 with a new afterword by Andre Dubus III.

Pancake died of suicide on Palm Sunday, 1979, at the age of 26. His motives for suicide are still somewhat unclear but many speculate the death of his father to alcoholism and the death of his close friend from a gruesome car accident could have had an influence on his choices—his writing style could also prove he was living a haunted life.

The unusual middle name "D'J" originated when The Atlantic Monthly misprinted his middle initials (D.J., for Dexter John) in the byline of Trilobites, a short story the magazine published in 1977. Pancake decided not to correct it. Dexter was Pancake's middle name; he took the name John after converting to Catholicism in his mid-20s.

Pancake briefly attended West Virginia Wesleyan College in Buckhannon before transferring to Marshall University in Huntington, where he completed a bachelor's degree in English education in 1974. After graduating from Marshall he spent time in the western United States, visiting his sister in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Blackburn argues that Pancake's works continue an American pastoral tradition. Blackburn states that, "The Stories, written during the 1970s, often depict the landscape of West Virginia as dying, barren, and unwelcoming. The characters who populate his stories are often impoverished, trapped in place, or failures in one way or another." These characters may be viewed as expanding on a common American theme- the struggle with living in "liminal spaces."

Breece D'J Pancake (b. Breece Dexter Pancake, June 29, 1952 – April 8, 1979) was an American short story writer. He is said to be "one of the greatest authors you've never heard of" according to an article on his work in Study Breaks. Pancake was a native of West Virginia. Several of his short stories were published in The Atlantic Monthly and other periodicals during his lifetime.