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Here as elsewhere I tried to make selections which are really (and not merely in the phrase from book jackets) “complete in themselves.” “Thus,” as I said in 1945, “the book can be dipped into as if it were a Faulkner anthology; but I also hope that some readers will go through it from beginning to end, following the characters and the sequence of events as if they were reading one continued story; and I hope they will find that it retains something of the organic unity of Faulkner’s legend.”
    MALCOLM COWLEY               
    1 I have let this paragraph stand, with the one that follows, as an accurate picture of Faulkner’s reputation in 1945.
    2 That was the tally in 1945. With one exception, all the books that Faulkner published after that year are concerned with Yoknapatawpha County. The exception is
A Fable
(1954), about a reincarnated Christ in the First World War. The Yoknapatawpha books, eight in number, are
Intruder in the Dust
(1948), about a lynching that is averted by a seventy-year-old spinster and a pair of boys;
Knight’s Gambit
(1949), recounting the adventures in detection of Gavin Stevens;
Collected Stones of William Faulkner
(1950), containing all the stories in
These 13
and
Doctor Martino
as well as several not previously collected;
Requiem for a Nun
(1951), a three-act drama, with narrative prologues to each act, about the later life of Temple Drake;
Big Woods
(1955), a cycle of hunting stories, some of them revised from chapters of
Go Down, Moses; The Town
(1957), second volume in the Snopes trilogy;
The Mansion
(1959), concluding the trilogy; and
The Reivers
, published a month before Faulkner’s death on July 6, 1962. In all, sixteen of his books belong to the Yoknapatawpha cycle, as well as half of another book (
The Wild Palms
) and it is hard to count how many stories.
    3 The Old Frenchman place was built in the 1830s by Louis Grenier, as Faulkner tells us in the prologue to the first act of
Requiem for a Nun
(1951).
    4 The essay by O’Donnell, “Faulkner’s Mythology,” appeared in the
Kenyon Review
(I, Summer 1939). It is reprinted in Hoffman and Vickery,
William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism
(Michigan State University Press, 1960).
    5 The one dated “Oxford. Saturday.” (Early November, 1944.) See
The Faulkner-Cowley File
, pp. 14–17.

1
THE OLD PEOPLE
Editor’s Note
    Here are four of Faulkner’s stories dealing with early days in Yoknapatawpha County: with the Indians, the first white settlers, and the McCaslin plantation in the time of Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy.
    The Indians in Faulkner’s country were Chickasaws. He paints them as being slow, brooding, cruel, serene, like the land itself, to which they belonged as much as did the wild creatures they hunted. The settlers disturbed this natural relationship. They found it easy to buy the Chickasaws’ land—even to cheat them out of a hundred square miles in one transaction, as did Thomas Sutpen—because the Indians were psychologically unable to place a cash value on it. Then, having driven the natives westward and having peopled the land with slaves—to grow more cotton to buy more Negroes to grow more cotton—the planters set about creating their own aristocratic order.
    Faulkner keeps looking back nostalgically to the old order, but he presents its virtues as being moral rather than material. There is no baronial pomp in his novels; no profusion of silk and silver, mahogany and moonlight and champagne. All the planters lived comfortably, with plenty of servants, but Faulkner never lets us forget that they were living on what had recently been the frontier. What he admires about them is not their wealth or hospitality or florid manners, but rather their unquestioningacceptance of a moral code that taught them “courage and honor and pride, and pity and love of justice and of liberty.” The code was the secret lost by their heirs and successors.
    “A Justice” is a story of the old days as