Every so often, in spite of judgment and all else, I take these fits of sort of raging and impotent exasperation at this really quite alarming paradox which my life reveals: Beginning at the age of thirty I, an artist, a sincere one and of the first class, who should be free even of his own economic responsibilities and with no moral conscience at all, began to become the sole, principal and partial support—food, shelter, heat, clothes, medicine, kotex, school fees, toilet paper and picture shows—of my mother, . . . [a] brother’s widow and child, a wife of my own and two step children, my own child; I inherited my father’s debts and his dependents, white and black without inheriting yet from anyone one inch of land or one stick of furniture or one cent of money. . . . I bought without help from anyone the house I live in and all the furniture; I bought my farm the same way. I am 42 years old and I have already paid for four funerals and will certainly pay for one more and in all likelihood two more beside that, provided none of the people in mine or my wife’s family my superior in age outlive me, before I ever come to my own.

—William Faulkner to Robert Haas, May 3, 1940