The Portable Faulkner

Comment re 1961 printing of the 1946 publication. Very helpful overview of Faulkner prior to the publication of The Mansion, The Town, and The Reivers. The mid-section of The Bear is in the style of Absalom, Absalom, but otherwise the selections are not too difficult. The major selections are 2 chapters from The Unvanquished, The Bear, Spotted Horses (eventually incorporated into The Hamlet) and the Old Man parts from The Wild Palms (aka O Jerusalem). The arrangement is in chronological order of the fictional history of Yoknapatawpha County, not the order of publication or -- I assume -- creation. One can't help but notice how Faulkner likes to mess around with names -- the dialog between Ike McCaslin and McCaslin Edmonds in The Bear's show more middle section, naming the bear Old Ben, possibly in homage to Ben/Benjy in the Dilsey selection from The Sound and the Fury, or that those excluded from privileged Southern society don't have names-- the convict in Old Man, the slaves and former slaves lacking surnames. Troubling that the unquestioned assumption is that resistance to Reconstruction is heroic, or that Ike McCaslin's vision of the corruption of the primeval wilderness is expressed via the mixing of ethnic groups in Delta Autumn. Old Man (i.e. the Mississippi River) has been compared to Huckleberry Finn; the dizzying loss of direction in the flood reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe stories like the Narrative of A. Gordon Pym and Descent into the Maelstrom. Faulkner does seem closer to Poe's gothic darkness than he does to Twain. At the end, the collection made me eager to go on to books like The Unvanquished, Flags in the Dust, and Go Down Moses, and to re-read The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom Absalom. show less

Includes selections of Faulkner's novels and short stories, ordered in such a manner so as to best coherently and linearly portray Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Thus far it has proven to be a wonderful collection; it appears to be quite comprehensive and very well planned out.

Faulkner is one of my favorite nonfiction authors. His notoriously difficult reading opens doors to extreme and fantastic worlds. This collection is shorts and excerpts

“I’d no idea Faulkner was in that bad shape and very happy you are putting together the Portable of him. He has the most talent of anybody and he just needs a sort of conscience that isn’t there. Certainly if no nation can exist half free and half slave no man can write half whore and half straight. But he will write absolutely perfectly straight and then go on and on and not be able to end it. I wish the christ I owned him like you’d own a horse and train him like a horse and race him like a horse—only in writing. How beautifully he can write and as simple and as complicated as autumn or as spring.”
Letter to Malcolm Cowley, 1945
Selected Letters, pg. 603-604

Good. No dust jacket. Includes: illustrations, maps. Book Description: The Viking Press, April 1946. Hardcover. Book Condition: Good. No Jacket. 16mo, mustard w/cloth binding, black titles, author name in mustard on black square on spine, stain spot on front cover, top of spine lightly worn, map by Faulkner himself on endpapers, previous owners name on fly (very small handwriting), an anthology of Faulkner's writings, 756 pages. INCLUDES the appendix "1699-1945 The Compsons".