Faulkner William - Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

2004 Modern Library Paperback Edition

Copyright 1965, 2004 by Random House, Inc.

Copyright 1932 by Modern Library and copyright renewed 1959 by William Faulkner Copyright 1954, 1955, 1956, 1958 by William Faulkner Copyright 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1963 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers Copyright renewed 1963 by Estelle Faulkner and Jill Faulkner Summers Copyright 1950 by Estelle Faulkner Copyright 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1960, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1980, 1982 by the Estate of William Faulkner Copyright 1954 by The Ford Motor Company Copyright 1956 by The Johnson Publishing Company Copyright 1973 by Jill Faulkner Summers

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

M ODERN L IBRARY and the T ORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

An earlier edition of this work was published by Random House, Inc., in 1965 in different form.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to W. W. Norton, Inc., for permission to reprint Address upon Receiving the Andrs Bello Award, Caracas, 1961, copyright 1988 by W. W. Norton, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Faulkner, William, 18971962.
Essays, speeches & public letters / by William Faulkner ; edited by James B.
Meriwether.[rev., 2nd ed.]
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-351-0
I. Title: Essays, speeches, and public letters. II. Meriwether,
James B. III. Title.
PS3511.A86A6 2004
818.5208dc22 2003044278

Modern Library website address: www.modernlibrary.com

v3.1

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His family was rooted in local history: his great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and railroad builder, was assassinated by a former partner in 1889, and his grandfather was a wealthy lawyer and banker. When Faulkner was five his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he was educated in local schools, dropping out of high school in 1915, early in his senior year. Rejected for pilot training in the U.S. Army, he joined the Royal Air Force in 1918, but the war ended when he was still in training in Toronto. After the war, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi and worked for a time at the university post office. Mostly, however, he educated himself by wide reading.

Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy, and in 1924 he published a poetry collection, The Marble Faun. His literary aspirations were fueled by his close friendship with Sherwood Anderson, whom he met during a stay in New Orleans. Faulkners first novel, Soldiers Pay, was published in 1926, followed a year later by Mosquitoes, a literary satire. His next book, Flags in the Dust, was heavily cut and rearranged at the publishers insistence and appeared finally as Sartoris in 1929. In the meantime he had completed The Sound and the Fury, and when it appeared at the end of 1929 he had finished Sanctuary and was ready to begin writing As I Lay Dying. That same year he married Estelle Oldham, recently divorced from Cornell Franklin, whom he had courted a decade and a half earlier.

Although Faulkner gained literary acclaim from these and subsequent novelsLight in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)and continued to publish stories regularly in magazines, he was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction. He worked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Warner Bros., forming a close relationship with director Howard Hawks, with whom he worked on To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, and Land of the Pharaohs, among other films.

In 1944 all but one of Faulkners novels were out of print, and his personal life was at low ebb. Before the war he had been discovered by Sartre and others in the French literary world. In the postwar period his reputation rebounded, as Malcolm Cowleys anthology The Portable Faulkner brought him fresh attention in America, and the immense esteem in which he was held in Europe consolidated his worldwide stature.

Faulkner wrote seventeen books set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, home of the Compson family of The Sound and the Fury. No land in all fiction lives more vividly in its physical presence than this county of Faulkners imagination, Robert Penn Warren wrote in an essay on Cowleys anthology. The descendants of the old families, the descendants of bushwhackers and carpetbaggers, the swamp rats, the Negro cooks and farm hands, the bootleggers and gangsters, tenant farmers, college boys, county-seat lawyers, country storekeepers, peddlersall are here in their fullness of life and their complicated interrelations.

In 1950 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his later novelsIntruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962)he continued to explore what he had called the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, but did so in the context of Yoknapatawphas increasing connection with the modern world.

He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.

The first edition of this collection was published by Random House on January 7, 1966. Intended to be as complete a collection as possible of the nonfiction prose that Faulkner had published or planned to publish, it contained sixty-three different pieces. Since then, a number of new items have turned up that I would have included in the original edition had I known about them, and still others have become available that belong here. In all, thirty-nine new items are added to this edition.

The editorial principles of this new edition remain the same, as do the categories of the pieces. To avoid an awkward number of subdivisions, I have stretched the definition of Public Letters to include dust-jacket blurbs and newspaper ads and announcements and have included Drama with the Book Reviews. Several corrections of errors in texts in the first edition have been silently made, and the endnotes of others have been expanded where new information has become available.

Included here are the six reviews that Faulkner contributed to the University of Mississippi undergraduate newspaper, The Mississippian, in 1920, 1921, and 1922. Carvel Collins republished them in William Faulkner: Early

Readers of William Faulkners fiction know its extraordinary variety. To take only three examples from among his best work: Could three great novels, written by one author, over a span of less than a decade and a half, differ more from one another than do The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses? On a much smaller scale, the same variety is to be found in his nonfiction prose. Such major pieces as the essays Mississippi, On Privacy, and On Fear, and the Foreword to