Repositories: FCVA, 21-pp. ts. and 18-pp. carbon ts. JFSA, 18-pp. ts.
1 In an undated letter to Goldman, Faulkner said he had finished the novel “yesterday.” The last page of the ms. of Pylon bears the date “25 November 1934.”
2 James B. Meriwether, “Faulkner’s Correspondence with The Saturday Evening Post,” pp. 466–67.
3 See James B. Meriwether, “Sartoris and Snopes: An Early Notice,” The Library Chronicle of The University of Texas, VII (Summer 1962), 36–39.
4 This sketch was first published by James B. Meriwether with an introduction and editorial corrections in “Nympholepsy,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 403–9.
5 NOS, pp. 3–14.
6 NOS, pp. 86–91
7 The sketch was first published by James B. Meriwether with an introduction and editorial corrections in “The Priest,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXIX (Summer 1976), 445–50.
8 ESPL, pp. 30–31.
9 Collected Stories of William Faulkner, pp. 475–510, 407–30, and 511–31.
10 See James B. Meriwether, “Two Unknown Faulkner Short Stories,” Recherches anglaises et américaines (Strasbourg), IV (1971), 23–30.
11 See James B. Meriwether, “Two Unknown Faulkner Short Stories,” Recherches anglaises et américaines (Strasbourg), IV (1971), 23–30.
12 “Books and Things: American Drama: Inhibitions,” EPP, pp. 93–98.
13 “The Hill,” William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins, Boston, Little Brown, 1962, pp. 90–92.
14 ESPL, pp. 7–8.
15 Letters of Sherwood Anderson, ed. Howard Mumford Jones, with Walter Rideout, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1953, pp. 162–64.
16 See also Walter B. Rideout and James B. Meriwether, “On the Collaboration of Faulkner and Anderson,” American Literature, XXXV (March 1963), 85–87.
17 NOS, pp. 46–54, 104–7.
18 James B. Meriwether, The Literary Career of William Faulkner, p. 87.
19 See James B. Meriwether, “Faulkner’s Correspondence with Scribner’s Magazine,” Proof, 3 (1973), 253–82.
20 For further commentary, see Béatrice Lang, “An Unpublished Faulkner Story: ‘The Big Shot,’ ” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 312–24.
21 For detailed treatments, see Thomas L. McHaney, “The Elmer Papers: Faulkner’s Comic Portraits of the Artist,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 281–311, and Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978), pp. 115–20.
22 For further commentary, see Frank Cantrell, “An Unpublished Faulkner Short Story: ‘Snow,’ ” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 325–30.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For biographical, bibliographical, and textual material in the notes to these stories I have drawn principally upon these sources:
Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, New York, Random House, 1974.
———, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, New York, Random House, 1977.
James B. Meriwether, The Literary Career of William Faulkner: A Bibliographical Study, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Library, 1961; revised edition: Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1971.
———, “The Short Fiction of William Faulkner: A Bibliography,” Proof: The Yearbook of American Bibliographical and Textual Studies, I (1971), 293–329.
Each of these works is fully indexed, and the interested reader will find them convenient to use for further study of Faulkner’s short stories.
The Literary Career of William Faulkner reproduces a schedule of Faulkner’s submission of stories to magazines and his agent, Ben Wasson, in 1930 and 1931. A useful essay in conjunction with this material is Max Putzel’s “Faulkner’s Sending Schedule,” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 71 (First Quarter, 1977), 98–105.
The following works are cited in the Notes. Faulkner works referred to by abbreviations and unannotated Faulkner works are not listed here.
Brooks, Cleanth, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1978.
Cantrell, Frank, “An Unpublished Faulkner Short Story: ‘Snow,’ ” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 325–30.
Faulkner, William. Mayday, South Bend, Ind., The University of Notre Dame Press, 1976, Afterword by Carvel Collins.
Jones, Howard Mumford, ed., with Walter B. Rideout, Letters of Sherwood Anderson, Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1953.
Lang, Béatrice, “An Unpublished Faulkner Short Story: The Big Shot,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 313–24.
McHaney, Thomas L., “The Elmer Papers: Faulkner’s Comic Portraits of the Artist,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 281–311.
Meriwether, James B., “Faulkner’s Correspondence with The Saturday Evening Post,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXX (Summer 1977), 461–75.
———, “Faulkner’s Correspondence with Scribner’s Magazine,” Proof, 3 (1973), 253–82.
———, “Frankie and Johnny,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXXI (Summer 1978), 453–64.
———, “Nympholepsy,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 403–9.
———, “The Priest,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXIX (Summer 1976), 45–50.
———, “Sartoris and Snopes: An Early Notice,” The Library Chronicle of The University of Texas, VII (Summer 1962), 36–39.
———, “Two Unknown Faulkner Short Stories,” Recherches anglaises et américaines (Strasbourg), IV (1971), 23–30.
Polk, Noel, “ ‘Hong Li’ and Royal Street: The New Orleans Sketches in Manuscript,” The Mississippi Quarterly, XXVI (Summer 1973), 344–45.
Rideout, Walter B., and James B. Meriwether, “On the Collaboration of Faulkner and Anderson,” American Literature, XXXV (March 1963), 85–87.
The following works deal with William Faulkner’s short stories and his techniques of revision, especially in the cases of stories in this volume which were later revised to become parts of books.
Brooks, Cleanth, “A Note on Faulkner’s Early Attempts at the Short Story,” Studies in Short Fiction, 10 (Fall 1973), 381–88.
Burggraf, David Leroy, “The Genesis and Unity of Faulkner’s Big Woods,” Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio University, 1976.
Carothers, James B., “William Faulkner’s Short Stories,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1970.
Cox, Leland Holcombe, Jr., “Sinbad in New Orleans: Early Short Fiction by William Faulkner: An Annotated Edition,” Ph.D. dissertation, 1978.
Creighton, Joanne V., William Faulkner’s Craft of Revision: The Snopes Trilogy, “The Unvanquished” and “Go Down, Moses,” Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977.
———, “Revision and Craftsmanship in the Hunting Trilogy of Go Down, Moses,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature, XV (Fall 1973), 577–92.
Early, James, The Making of “Go Down, Moses,” Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press, 1972.
Gregory, Eileen, “Faulkner’s Typescripts of The Town,” in A Faulkner Miscellany, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1974, pp. 113–38.
———, “A Study of the Early Versions of Faulkner’s The Town and The Mansion,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1975.
Grimwood, James Michael, “Pastoral and Parody: The Making of Faulkner’s Anthology Novels,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1977.
Harter, Carol Ann Clancey, “The Diaphoric Structure and Unity of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses,” Ph.D. dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1970.
———, “The Winter of Ike McCaslin: Revisions and Irony in Faulkner’s ‘Delta Autumn,’ ” Journal of Modern Literature, 1 (1970), 209–25.
Hochberg, Mark R., “The Unity of Go Down, Moses,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 21 (1976), 58–65.
Holmes, Edward M., Faulkner’s Twice-Told Tales: His Re-Use of His Material, The H
ague, Mouton, 1966.
Kibler, James E., Jr., “A Study of the Text of William Faulkner’s The Hamlet,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of South Carolina, 1970.
Klotz, Marvin, “Procrustean Revision in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses,” American Literature, 37 (March 1965), 1–16.
Lisca, Peter, “The Hamlet: Genesis and Revisions,” Faulkner Studies, 3 (Spring 1954), 5–13.
Meriwether, James B., “The Place of The Unvanquished in William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Series,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1958.
Millgate, Jane, “Short Stories into Novels: A Textual and Critical Study of Some Aspects of Faulkner’s Literary Method,” M.A. thesis, University of Leeds, 1962.
Momberger, Philip, “A Critical Study of Faulkner’s Early Sketches and Collected Stories,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1972.
Ploegstra, Henry A., “William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses: Its Sources, Revisions, and Structure,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1966.
Roth, Russell, “The Brennan Papers: Faulkner in Manuscript,” Perspective, 2 (Summer 1949), 219–24.
Serruya, Barbara B., “The Evolution of an Artist: A Genetic Study of William Faulkner’s The Hamlet,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Los Angeles, 1974.
Simpson, Hassell Algernon, “The Short Stories of William Faulkner,” Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 1962.
Tick, Stanley, “The Unity of Go Down, Moses,” Twentieth Century Literature, 8 (July 1962), 67–73.
Watkins, Floyd C., and Thomas Daniel Young, “Revisions of Style in Faulkner’s The Hamlet,” Modern Fiction Studies, 5 (Winter 1959), 327–336.
Wills, Arthur, “A Study of Faulkner’s Revisions,” Exercise Exchange, 10 (March 1963), 14–16.
Winn, James A., “Faulkner’s Revisions: A Stylist at Work,” American Literature, 41 (May 1969), 231–50.
WILLIAM FAULKNER
(1897–1962)
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry and Maud Butler Falkner (he later added the ‘u’ to the family name himself). In 1904 the family moved to the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner was to spend most of his life. He was named for his great-grandfather ‘The Old Colonel,’ a Civil War veteran who built a railroad, wrote a bestselling romantic novel called The White Rose of Memphis, became a Mississippi state legislator, and was eventually killed in what may or may not have been a duel with a disgruntled business partner. Faulkner identified with this robust and energetic ancestor and often said that he inherited the ‘ink stain’ from him.
Never fond of school, Faulkner left at the end of football season his senior year of high school, and began working at his grandfather’s bank. In 1918, after his plans to marry his sweetheart Estelle Oldham were squashed by their families, he tried to enlist as a pilot in the U.S. Army but was rejected because he did not meet the height and weight requirements. He went to Canada, where he pretended to be an Englishman and joined the RAF training program there. Although he did not complete his training until after the war ended and never saw combat, he returned to his hometown in uniform, boasting of war wounds. He briefly attended the University of Mississippi, where he began to publish his poetry.
After spending a short time living in New York, he again returned to Oxford, where he worked at the university post office. His first book, a collection of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published at Faulkner’s own expense in 1924. The writer Sherwood Anderson, whom he met in New Orleans in 1925, encouraged him to try writing fiction, and his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926. It was followed by Mosquitoes. His next novel, which he titled Flags in the Dust, was rejected by his publisher and twelve others to whom he submitted it. It was eventually published in drastically edited form as Sartoris (the original version was not issued until after his death). Meanwhile, he was writing The Sound and the Fury, which, after being rejected by one publisher, came out in 1929 and received many ecstatic reviews, although it sold poorly. Yet again, a new novel, Sanctuary, was initially rejected by his publisher, this time as ‘too shocking.’ While working on the night shift at a power plant, Faulkner wrote what he was determined would be his masterpiece, As I Lay Dying. He finished it in about seven weeks, and it was published in 1930, again to generally good reviews and mediocre sales.
In 1929 Faulkner had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle, after her divorce from her first husband. They had a premature daughter, Alabama, who died ten days after birth in 1931; a second daughter, Jill, was born in 1933.
With the eventual publication of his most sensational and violent (as well as, up until then, most successful) novel, Sanctuary (1931), Faulkner was invited to write scripts for MGM and Warner Brothers, where he was responsible for much of the dialogue in the film versions of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and many other films. He continued to write novels and published many stories in popular magazines. Light in August (1932) was his first attempt to address the racial issues of the South, an effort continued in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942). By 1946, most of Faulkner’s novels were out of print in the United States (although they remained well-regarded in Europe), and he was seen as a minor, regional writer. But then the influential editor and critic Malcolm Cowley, who had earlier championed Hemingway and Fitzgerald and others of their generation, put together The Portable Faulkner, and once again Faulkner’s genius was recognized, this time for good. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature as well as many other awards and accolades, including the National Book Award and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and France’s Legion of Honor.
In addition to several collections of short fiction, his other novels include Pylon (1935), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962).
William Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he is buried.
‘He is the greatest artist the South has produced.… Indeed, through his many novels and short stories, Faulkner fights out the moral problem which was repressed after the nineteenth century [yet] for all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.’
—RALPH ELLISON
‘Faulkner, more than most men, was aware of human strength as well of human weakness. He knew that the understanding and the resolution of fear are a large part of the writer’s reason for being.’
—JOHN STEINBECK
‘For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner’s works] are without equal in our time and country.’
—ROBERT PENN WARREN
‘No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about that heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there.’
—EUDORA WELTY
ALSO BY WILLIAM FAULKNER
ABSALOM, ABSALOM!
One of Faulkner’s finest achievements, Absalom, Absalom! is the story of Thomas Sutpen and the ruthless, single-minded pursuit of his grand design—to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830—which is ultimately destroyed (along with Sutpen himself) by his two sons.
AS I LAY DYING
As I Lay Dying is the harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told by each of the family members—including Addie herself—the novel ranges from dark comedy to deepest pathos.
A FABLE
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, this allegorical novel about World War I is set in the trenches of France and deals with a mutiny in a French regiment.
FLAGS IN THE DUST
The complete text, published for the first time in 1973, of Faulkner’s third novel, written when he was twenty-nine, which appeared, with his reluctant consent, in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris.
LIGHT IN AUGUST
A novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, Light in August tells the tales of guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, an enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
THE REIVERS
One of Faulkner’s comic masterpieces and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, The Reivers is a picaresque tale that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi and their wild misadventures in the fast life of Memphis—from horse smuggling to bawdy houses.
REQUIEM FOR A NUN
The sequel to Faulkner’s most sensational novel Sanctuary, was written twenty years later but takes up the story of Temple Drake eight years after the events related in Sanctuary. Temple is now married to Gowan Stevens. The book begins when the death sentence is pronounced on the nurse Nancy for the murder of Temple and Gowan’s child. In an attempt to save her, Temple goes to see the judge to confess her own guilt. Told partly in prose, partly in play form, Requiem for a Nun is a haunting exploration of the impact of the past on the present.
THE SOUND AND THE FURY
One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in American literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the man-child Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant.