[4][5] At the time of its publication in 1996, Father and Son was Brown's third published novel and his sixth book to have appeared over the previous eight years.

[6] It followed after his first two published novels: Dirty Work (1988) and Joe (1992); two story collections: Facing the Music (1988) and Big Bad Love (1991); and the “short haunting memoir” On Fire (1993).

When I wrote the first scene, where Glen Davis and his brother Puppy are driving back into town, I didn’t see the Square I see now […] I saw that old Oxford […] and I knew that they had driven in one hot Saturday afternoon back during my childhood, and I remember the way things were.”[7]Father and Son is set in 1968 in and around Oxford, Mississippi including nearby Tula and Paris.

[4] Like he did in the fiction he published before Father and Son, Brown uses:“the basic settings, speech, and themes of traditional Southern fiction — the tangled loyalties of family and community, the pressures of history, soul-grinding poverty and economic struggle, and Southerners’ visceral bond with the land…”[5]At the time of its publication, Publishers Weekly gave Father and Son unqualified praise calling it Brown's “most wise, humane and haunting work to date.”[8] Kirkus Reviews called it a “riveting tale of an unforgiving and cruel world.”[9] Anthony Quinn, in his review for The New York Times, found the book to be a “commendable novel short of being a flat-out success,” but acknowledged that Brown had established a distinct voice and vision of his own: “The model is William Faulkner, but his influence has been absorbed and transcended: the cumulative effect of this blue-collar tragedy proves it the work of a writer absolutely confident of his own voice.”[10] Writing in The Virginian-Pilot, Eugene McAvoy muted his praise of the novel, calling it a “competent, though imperfect, novel” but it is “testimony to a daring voice in American letters.”[6]

I think that Larry brought back some of those darker elements to Southern literature that maybe had been eroded since the time of Flannery O’Connor and Faulkner.