The Lost Speech and Other Stories by Clay Putman In one of these stories an English professor remarks to his class, “Words are important. Each one means what it says, right there in its place.” That is true of Clay Putman’s writing, as a careful reader will appreciate. A third of these stories were included in annual Prize Stories – O. Henry Awards or Best American Short Stories or named on its Honor Rolls. Several were reprinted in other anthologies: Twenty Years of Stanford Short Stories, A Country of the Mind, and Students’ Choice. Four previously unpublished stories, about Jacob Cole, are excerpts edited by the author’s widow from a novel-in-progress at his death in 1984. Settings range from the Great Depression in the l930’s through World War II and on into the 1970’s, with a visit to 1865 in the title story, and from California through the midwest to New York and Europe. In these stories the author probes the perils of intimacy and the search for individual identity and selfhood, the struggle to find it, to achieve it, to maintain it, and the desolation of its loss. Putman is also author of a novel, The Ruined City, published in 1959. In the Saturday Review of Literature, Herbert Gold called it a “brilliant, harrowing” book. The Library Journal critic wrote that it “will probably be considered one of the best novels of the year.” The stories in this selection were written over a period of more than thirty years, beginning with “The White Road,” published in 1948 while Putman was still an undergraduate at Stanford University. Clay Putman was born in 1924 in Quapaw, Okla. (pop. 165), in the Bible-dust-cyclone belt, to a lead and zinc miner and his wife, a Kansas farmer’s daughter who had trained to be a school teacher. In 1934 the Depression shut down the mines and the family packed all they could into their car and moved to the Los Angeles, Calif., area where he grew up. He served in the World War II army, 1943-46, in the U.S. and Europe and at war’s end stayed on in the military occupation of Germany. He then entered Stanford on the GI Bill of Rights as an English major and began to write. He won two story contests there and graduated in 1949 “with distinction,” Phi Beta Kappa membership and the award of a Stanford writing fellowship for 1949-50. He then taught fulltime at Cornell while earning an MA degree. He was a guest at the Yaddo Foundation, Saratoga Springs, N.Y., for two summers and at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont in 1953. That fall he was awarded a Rockefeller-Western Review grant in recognition of his published stories. In 1954 he married and resumed teaching, at George Washington University and from 1957 on at San Francisco State University as a professor of English and Creative Writing, serving as coordinator and then chairman of the Creative Writing, 1966-68.

Listing 2 stories.