UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER

Twenty of the stories here were subsequently re-hammered into such Faulkner novels as The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, and The Mansion; where and just how they were changed will be of obvious interest to scholars and students of Faulkner's work (and their numbers are legion). Others of the pieces here collected either never saw print or were juvenilia (dripping, sopping, with verbiage and little else)—New Orleans life-studies, attempts (unsuccessful) at literary comedy, and a few flyboy stories that go on too long. Unlike Fitzgerald's recently published leavings (The Price Was High, 1978, p. 1263), Faulkner's are too varied in tone to be really bad, yet too heatless to be good. Excepting those reworked into longer fiction, they seem mostly elegant and tooled grabs at the market—legitimate but not very interesting. Professor Blotner (Faulkner, 1974), as is his meticulous wont, has provided notes about each story that seem to leave out only the bond-weight of the manuscript pages. Academic interest exclusively.