FOREWORD
 

In making a collection of representative short stories by William Faulkner, the only restriction is necessarily geographical. With one exception—“Turn About” which derives from the time of the First World War when Faulkner served with the British Royal Air Force—all these tales have their locale in and about Oxford, Mississippi, the author’s birthplace and lifelong home. Their spirit is of an unreconstructed South and their substance is of the tortured and involuted lives of a people still in the shadow of the devastation of our Civil War.

By the frequency with which it appears in anthologies, “A Rose for Emily” has achieved for itself general recognition as one of the most ghastly and haunting tales of American literature. Only second to it in the choice of editors is “The Hound,” another macabre tour de force with a bitterly ironic ending.

As a study in primitive fear, “That Evening Sun” strikes a terrorizing note, and “Dry September” reflects the fiercest passions of a mob bent upon a lynching.

Written in a later period, “Delta Autumn” is a retrospective summoning by an old man of a South that had its brief moment of glory and its long slow decay. More vengeful in spirit and the telling is “Barn Burning,” a dramatic story of harbored spitefulness and malicious revenge. Finally, there is “An Odor of Verbena,” an evocation in the romantic vein of a proud people who, even after the Civil War, tried desperately to believe in their own invincibility.

These eight stories reflect the deep love and loathing, the tenderness and contempt, the identification and repudiation William Faulkner has felt for the traditions and the way of life of his own portion of the world.

—SAXE COMMINS

April, 1945