The Rest of Faulkner

During the difficult years when he did much of his finest work and received very little credit for it, William Faulkner was best known to his American audience not for his novels, which did not sell, but for his short fiction. From 1930 until after World War II, Faulkner made a good portion of his living by writing short stories for the great popular magazines of the day. As we learn from his correspondence with agents, editors, and publishers, he produced with astonishing regularity new or revised work in what he called “the most demanding form after poetry.” Altogether, in his lifetime, he published almost one hundred stories, the first in 1919, the last in 1955. And when his selection of the best of the lot, 42 stories in all, came out in 1950, that volume, Collected Stories, was greeted with general acclaim and flattering comparisons to the oeuvres of such masters of the genre as Chekhov, Conrad, and James. It is therefore a considerable irony that this component of his total achievement fell into critical neglect and general obscurity with the emergence of his reputation as a novelist after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950.

Certain Faulkner stories have, of course, never gone out of circulation. The textbook anthologies and retrospective collections of “best stories” have continued to include the predictable “A Rose for Emily,” “That Evening Sun,” and “Barn Burning.” And Collected Stories—along with Knight’s Gambit, published the previous year— has remained in print, even while the audience for new work in the genre has steadily declined. Yet there has been surprisingly little commentary, little acknowledgment of the importance to his overall artistic development of the “unity and coherence and emphasis” that Faulkner achieved in these and other stories.

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About the Author

M. E. Bradford

During the difficult years when he did much of his finest work and received very little credit for it, William Faulkner was best known to his American audience not for his novels, which did not sell, but for his short fiction. From 1930 until after World War II, Faulkner made a good portion of his living by writing short stories for the great popular magazines of the day. As we learn from his correspondence with agents, editors, and publishers, he produced with astonishing regularity new or revised work in what he called “the most demanding form after poetry.” Altogether, in his lifetime, he published almost one hundred stories, the first in 1919, the last in 1955. And when his selection of the best of the lot, 42 stories in all, came out in 1950, that volume, Collected Stories, was greeted with general acclaim and flattering comparisons to the oeuvres of such masters of the genre as Chekhov, Conrad, and James. It is therefore a considerable irony that this component of his total achievement fell into critical neglect and general obscurity with the emergence of his reputation as a novelist after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950.

Certain Faulkner stories have, of course, never gone out of circulation. The textbook anthologies and retrospective collections of “best stories” have continued to include the predictable “A Rose for Emily,” “That Evening Sun,” and “Barn Burning.” And Collected Stories—along with Knight’s Gambit, published the previous year— has remained in print, even while the audience for new work in the genre has steadily declined. Yet there has been surprisingly little commentary, little acknowledgment of the importance to his overall artistic development of the “unity and coherence and emphasis” that Faulkner achieved in these and other stories.