An episodic novel set in rural north Texas in the 1920s, this thesis concerns the life of Lizzie Brown and her son Luke. Suffering from a series of emotional shocks combined with a chronic hormonal imbalance, Lizzie is hospitalized shortly after Luke's fourth birthday. Just as she is to be discharged, he husband dies unexpectedly. Viewed by society as incompetent to care for Luke and operate her ranch alone, she finds herself homeless. She returns to her brother's home briefly, but eventually is declared NCM and institutionalized. The story also concerns Luke, his relationships with his father and other relatives who care for him in Lizzie's absence. As he matures, he must deal with society's attitudes regarding mental illness and orphans. The story ends with Lizzie's funeral when he is twenty.

The critical introduction to this collection of short fiction argues that writing is reading and that reading is writing. The argument draws descriptions of writing as reading from such diverse sources as Sherwood Anderson, Roland Barthes, Neil Simon, J. Hillis Miller and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as from the author's own experience. Descriptions of reading from phenomenological and subjective criticism, including the theories of Georges Poulet, Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish and David Bleich, affirm the creative role of the reader, show that the reader, in fact, writes the text in the process of reading. The introduction concludes that reader, writer and text are all constructs of language, that both reading and writing are, ultimately and primarily, thought.

The dissertation is a collection of eighteen short stories. These stories relate the life experiences of the first-person narrator and chronicle a period of twenty years. They are arranged in five thematic groups: Expectations, Questions, Lighter Moments, Answers, and Separation. The focus of each one represents the narrator's experiences with his father, as the narrator attempts to understand a man who exerts such control over his life. Expectations contains three stories, with the first depicting the narrator's earliest association with his father. The other two represent significant growth experiences. The five stories in the Questions portion focus on the youthful narrator as he tries to understand the reasons behind his father's values and moral lessons. In the section, Lighter Moments, there are four stories in which the narrator is in his late teens and recalls four incidents that lacked the usual serious undertones prevalent in most of his experiences with his father. Answers is composed of three stories in which the narrator, nearing manhood, struggles with feelings of disillusionment with the life his father has planned for him, as well as the realization that his father controls every aspect of his life. The final section of three stories, Separation, depicts …