A Triumph of Pre-Criticism

In 1963 the Yale University Press published Cleanth Brooks’s magisterial William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. Its subject was the body of major fiction set in Faulkner’s Mississippi microcosm, the mythical county just south and east of Memphis, of which he was, by his own denomination, “sole owner and proprietor.” Now, after 15 years, Cleanth Brooks’s labor is rounded out. In William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond the focus is upon the apprentice work (in prose and in verse) and the fiction