Two non-SF novels, Wilderness of Spring (1958) and The Trial of Callista Blake (1961) would come before EP's return to the genre, and the remainder of his work published in book form would be devoted almost exclusively to what is referred to as the Davy cycle. The novel by that name was the first of the series published, in 1964, even though it recounts incidents at the far end of the sequence, some 250 years after a nuclear holocaust has plunged the U.S. into a balkanized and somewhat medieval-like existence. Most of the remainder of this series was presented in collections of linked short stories, even though some were marketed as if they were novels. As we have seen in other "future histories" - such as with Heinlein and Cordwainer Smith - the publication schedule does not necessarily equate to the chronological sequence of the stories themselves. Using internal clues, the Davy chronicle can be roughly ordered in this way: The Company of Glory (1975 collection); Still I Persist in Wondering (1978 collection); The Judgment of Eve (1966 novel); and Davy (1964 novel - although portions had been previously published as short stories). Other stories outside of this sequence were collected in the volume Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972), as far as I know the only one of his SF titles that I do not have.

Editor and critic Damon Knight once said this of Pangborn's work: "...very much like the thing Stapledon was always talking about and never quite managing to convey: the regretful, ironic, sorrowful, deeply joyous—and purblind—love of the world and all in it."

Spider Robinson, in his introduction to Still I Persist in Wondering, echoed much the same sentiment: "His two essential themes were love and human stupidity (perhaps human insensitivity is more correct)…He said again and again in his books that love is not a condition or an event or even a state of mind—that love is a country, which we are sometimes privileged to visit—and again and again he wrote of the exploration of that fantastic region."

I realize this article is entirely too brief, considering how good a writer I consider Pangborn to be. Yet in all his years he gave us so few stories (less that a dozen shorts outside of the Davy cycle, and only four or five other novels). His work was not significant enough to merit a Grand Master Award even if the SFWA allowed those to be presented posthumously, and they don't even do that for their Author Emeritus category, besides that wasn't implemented until nineteen years after Pangborn's passing. His fans had to settle for him being honored in 2003 as the third recipient of the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award. His is a body of work that definitely deserves to be rediscovered by anyone who wants to have a full view of the scope of science fiction literature.