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In this chapter, Dorothy Parker discusses William Faulkner's novel The Town, which she declares the best fiction of 1957. Parker says she wishes to sendThe Town to those she most loves and respects. According to Parker, she cannot consider The Town as Faulkner's finest work because his books are so variegated that comparisons among them are not possible. The Town comes after The Hamlet in Faulkner's triptych of the horrible, evil, greedy, irresistible Snopes family, on their way to taking over full power in Yoknapatawpha County. Parker once said that 1957 was no banner year for American novels, but admits that The Town made her a fool and a liar.

This chapter discusses the work of William Faulkner, describing him as a man of genius, although a willfully and perversely chaotic one. Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi; in his vast work the provincial and dusty town, surrounded by the shanties of poor whites and Negroes, is the center of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. During World War I, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He then became a poet, a journalist connected with New Orleans publications, and the author of famous novels and movie scenarios. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Faulkner represents in American letters that feudal and agrarian South which lost in the Civil War. Among his works are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Intruder in the Dust.

In the Faulknerian universe, there is no problem with community in nature. Difficulties develop as man moves out of nature, as he seeks to dominate and destroy the natural order. In Yoknapatawpha, it began with the Indians who imagined wrongly that they owned the land and sold it to the white men. Then the white men divided all the land neatly into squares, which they proceeded to sell and buy among themselves as if they really owned those fragments of earth. In the modern world, the prime mover in the process was the industrial revolution and its technological, commercial, and financial concomitants. Faulkner's stories are replete with trees and forests that tore them violently away. Again and again, he traced the story of — as he so eloquently called it — “the slain wood.” His characters suffered the fate of the wood. Cut away from their roots, torn and shaped by machines, they met the plight of life in the modern world.

This chapter comments on William Faulkner's imaginative, intuitive world known as Yoknapatawpha County—which it considers one of the most convincing ever conceived by a writer. Faulkner's own “little postage stamp of native soil,” as he called it, was a spiritual kingdom that he transformed into a microcosm not only of the South but also of the human race. More than any other major American novelist, with the possible exception of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Faulkner stayed close to home. Despite his later sojourns in Hollywood and in Charlottesville, Virginia, his physical and emotional fidelity to Oxford and to Mississippi, to the land and the people that shaped him, was at the core of his being. The chapter also discusses Faulkner's stand on racism and poverty, which had forever been his native state's twin burdens.

This chapter explores how the act of cinema-going in the racially organized and coded space of the southern Jim Crow movie house worked to construct and consolidate a white racial identity for economically and/or spatially peripheral whites sampling the new goods, services, and pleasures available in modernizing, urbanizing environments. Drawing on recent scholarship on the social history of film viewership in the segregation-era South, it looks at the connections between white film spectatorship and the racializing activity of “consuming” racial violence in the form of spectacle lynching. The chapter examines these connections in William Faulkner’s fictions such as “Dry September” and Light in August in the context of viewership that is simultaneously inside and outside the operation of normative whiteness in Yoknapatawpha.

This chapter explores the themes covered in William Faulkner’s work. It considers a place he invented, Yoknapatawpha County, the setting of a multitude of novels and short stories over the course of more than three decades. He filled this place with fictional characters, most of which were either historically accurate or plausible. It is argued that Faulkner’s writing is historical because so many of the people and events, the language and customs, could only be found in this part of the world and in the particular time in which Faulkner set them.

This chapter focuses on the publication of Brown’s first few stories, which won him an audience nationwide as well as in Mississippi. It tells the story of how Brown was invited to read at Yoknapatawpha County Arts Festival hosted by the Center for Southern Studies at Ole Miss. Glennray Tutor, an Oxford artist whom Brown had met earlier, attended the public reading. Tutor believed that Brown pursued their friendship because he wanted someone from a similar background with whom he could discuss the nature of artistic expression. The connection between the two men was not merely artistic but also social. Tutor and his son, Zach, often fished with Larry, and Tutor and his first wife, Barb, became frequent visitors to the Brown home in Yocona. Tutor also became one of Brown’s correspondents.

This chapter argues that the kinship between Faulkner and Miguel de Cervantes is not primarily a question of European “influence” but of dense cultural intertextuality and translatability. Spanish readers of Faulkner’s time found in his fictional treatment of the American Civil War a way of dealing with their own civil war (1936–39). In that sense, Faulkner was crucial to the readers and writers of Spain. But Spain, too, provided inspiration for Faulkner, many of whose works, from Pylon (1935) to The Mansion (1959), were inspired by Don Quixote, a novel he admired and reread on a regular basis. The chapter identifies the many surprising connections between Renaissance Spain and the post-Civil War South to show that the characters of La Mancha share a number of social concerns with those of Yoknapatawpha.