"Blackberry Winter" is a work of short fiction by Robert Penn Warren first appearing as a chapbook offered by Cummington Press in 1946.
Accustomed to going barefoot in the summer, his mother insists that he resume wearing his shoes in the aftermath of the blackberry winter.
Intending to evade his mother, Seth prepares to depart the house unshod, but he sees a strange man approaching from the woods.
A veteran of the Civil War who served with Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry reports that he consumed maggot-infested horseflesh during his enlistment in order to survive.
Seth's father departs to check on the flooded crops, and the boy visits the cabin of black sharecropper Old Jebb and his common law wife Dellie.
With no regular farm work available, his father bestows a half day's wage on the man; when the tramp curses him, he is ordered off the property.
"[5][6] Biographer Joseph R. Millichap reminds the reader that, however realistic or autobiographical certain details the story may appear, many are not: the characters are purely fictional.
The milieu that Warren creates is however based on his childhood in the "Black Patch" of rural western Kentucky and Tennessee in the early 20th century.
[7] Robert Penn Warren in his Blackberry Winter: A Recollection: "It crosses my mind that the vividness with which I always remembered writing this story may have something to do with the situation in which it was written.
"[10] Millichap writes, "Perhaps no single, postwar American story has been so often anthologized, so frequently alluded to, or so highly praised as 'Blackberry Winter.
'"[11] Millichap writes, "Warren's most famous tale does not depend on poetic prose or narrative artifice: rather, it balances a precise realism of detail, including accurate social observation and a harsh naturalism of theme against its lyric recollection of youthful innocence.