Books by Noel Polk

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! is often considered to be Faulkner's greatest book, and one of his most compelling explorations of race, gender, and the burdens of the past. The plot revolves around the character of Thomas Sutpen, son of poor whites in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Densely written and notoriously "difficult," the novel explores the question of why Sutpen's son, Henry, killed Charles Bon, his friend and classmate, and the suitor of his sister, Judith. The action shifts from the early 19th century, when this event took place, to the "present" (1909-1910), when Quentin Compson, a student at Harvard, becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his ancestor Sutpen--and hence about his family's past--and the relevance of that truth to the present.

ABSALOM, ABSALOM! is often considered to be Faulkner's greatest book, and one of his most compelling explorations of race, gender, and the burdens of the past. The plot revolves around the character of Thomas Sutpen, son of poor whites in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Densely written and notoriously "difficult," the novel explores the question of why Sutpen's son, Henry, killed Charles Bon, his friend and classmate, and the suitor of his sister, Judith. The action shifts from the early 19th century, when this event took place, to the "present" (1909-1910), when Quentin Compson, a student at Harvard, becomes obsessed with discovering the truth about his ancestor Sutpen--and hence about his family's past--and the relevance of that truth to the present.

William Faulkner's AS I LAY DYING was published in 1930, exactly a year after THE SOUND AND THE FURY. A stream-of-consciousness novel narrated from 15 different points of view, AS I LAY DYING opens as the Bundren matriarch, Addie, is dying at the family home in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. (His later novel ABSALOM, ABSALOM includes a map of the place.) The novel chronicles the struggle of this clan of poor whites--Addie's husband, Anse, and their extended family--to travel to Jefferson, the county seat, to bury Addie, at her request, in the town she came from. Their hapless nine-day journey includes a flooded river, drowned mules, a broken leg, impatient buzzards circling the body, and a fire in a barn where they take refuge. Faulkner's bleakly comic novel, which explores the nature of grief, community, and family, is considered one of his masterpieces.

This book collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication and underscores the significance of Polk's indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts. In the title essay, his focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten, have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in this essay.

This full-dress bibliography of the works of one of America's greatest writers contains essential information for all serious scholars of Eudora Welty and her long and distinguished career. It is a complete record of the rich treasury of the various physical forms in which her books have been published and reprinted over the course of her long life in professional writing. Her career, begun in 1936 when she published her first short story in a "little magazine"' in Ohio, has flourished, along with her growing stature as a major figure in world literature, with an ever-increasing proliferation of new editions and foreign translations. For more than twenty years Noel Polk has been one of the leading scholars of Welty's works. During these two decades he has compiled this definitive catalog in which he details the casing, colors, size, paper type, binding format, and dust jacket of each book and analyzes the various editions, printings, states, and issues of each title. He includes a history of the writing, editing, publishing, and printing of each book, compiled from publishers' and agents' records. Polk divides the bibliography into two chronological sections. The first focuses on Welty's books. The other focuses of her publications in magazines, her fiction and nonfiction prose contributions to books other than her own, and her juvenilia, book reviews, dust-jacket blurbs, poetry, and photographic work. The bibliography includes a list of translations of Welty's works into other languages. An appendix, "A Eudora Welty Publishing Log", chronologically lists extracts from the bibliography that demonstrate the intimate interconnection of all facets of Welty's extraordinary career.

Lucas Beauchamp of GO DOWN, MOSES reappears in INTRUDER IN THE DUST. Beauchamp has been accused of murdering a white man, Vinson Gowrie. To save Lucas from lynching, it is up to teenaged Chick Mallison, with the help of an old woman and a small boy, to find the real murderer. William Faulkner's fine mystery novel was made into an acclaimed motion picture in 1949, filmed on location in Oxford Mississippi, Faulkner's home town. (The author's participation was reluctant, and he did not write the screenplay.)

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury met with only limited success when published in 1929, probably due to its fragmented, non-chronological structure. Since, however, it has become one of the most popular of Faulkner's novels, serving as a litmus paper upon which critical approaches have tested themselves. In the introduction to this volume Noel Polk traces the critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Sound and the Fury from a variety of critical perspectives. Dawn Trouard offers us the women of The Sound and the Fury, reading against the grain of the predominant critical tradition that sees the women through the lens of masculine cultural biases. Donald M. Kartiganer comes to terms with the ways in which the novel simultaneously attracts readers and resists readings. Richard Godden discusses the relationship between incest and miscegenation. Noel Polk examines closely the way Faulkner experiments with language.

Three novels from the celebrated Southern writer chronicle offer a sampling of Faulkner's infamous Snopes saga--including The Mansion, which portrays the downfall of the rapacious, cruel dynasty--and his lesser-known comic novel The Reivers, which is set around a Memphis brothel.

PYLON, one of Faulkner's minor novels, is set in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and centers on a group of airmen who are in town for the festivities. It was published in 1935.

This volume guides readers through one of William Faulkner's most complex novels. By common consent The Sound and the Fury is a seminal document of twentieth-century literature. Almost from the beginning it has been a litmus test for critical approaches -- from New Criticism to biography and manuscript analysis. In the past two decades nearly all of the newest critical theories have come calling -- deconstruction and new historicism, as well as culture, gender, and race studies. Yet the novel resists or evades even the most ardent theorists' efforts to contain it, and much of its total accomplishment remains unplumbed. Many of its smaller parts are still mysteries, and the novel remains a formidable challenge not just for beginners but for more sophisticated readers as well. This volume, like others in the Reading Faulkner series, provides line-by-line interpretation, concentrating on individual words and sentences, visual dimensions, time shifts, intricacies of narration, and other obscurities. It explores Faulkner's words as they appear on the page, deciphering an responding to them in their linear progression and in their cumulating resonances inside and outside the text. Important allusions and references are identified, as are dates and historical personages. For many passages alternative readings are offered. The pagination is keyed to the definitive text of the Vintage edition.

REQUIEM FOR A NUN is a sequel to the earlier SANCTUARY, and continues the story of Temple Drake eight years later. Now married to Gowan Stevens, Temple tries to save the life of a nurse who is accused of murdering Temple and Gowan's child. Most of the novel is presented in the form of a play. Each act begins with an essay giving the background of the events and a history of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, as well as a consideration of the ways in which the past affects the present--Faulkner's perennial theme.

SANCTUARY is Faulkner's most notorious novel; its sensational subject matter was particularly disturbing to the inhabitants of his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, many of whom felt Faulkner presented a distorted picture of their community. The novel tells the story of Temple Drake, an Alabama debutante who falls under the influence of a sinister bootlegger named Popeye. In the introduction to "Sanctuary" (one of the few introductions he wrote), Faulkner admits that the book was "a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money." (SANCTUARY was in fact his only best-seller.) Faulkner liked to boast that he wrote the novel in three weeks, but he also revised it extensively before final publication.

SANCTUARY is Faulkner's most notorious novel; its sensational subject matter was particularly disturbing to the inhabitants of his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, many of whom felt Faulkner presented a distorted picture of their community. The novel tells the story of Temple Drake, an Alabama debutante who falls under the influence of a sinister bootlegger named Popeye. In the introduction to "Sanctuary" (one of the few introductions he wrote), Faulkner admits that the book was "a cheap idea, because it was deliberately conceived to make money." (SANCTUARY was in fact his only best-seller.) Faulkner liked to boast that he wrote the novel in three weeks, but he also revised it extensively before final publication. REQUIEM FOR A NUN is a sequel to the earlier SANCTUARY, and continues the story of Temple Drake eight years later. Now married to Gowan Stevens, Temple tries to save the life of a nurse who is accused of murdering Temple and Gowan's child. Most of the novel is presented in the form of a play. Each act begins with an essay giving the background of the events and a history of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, as well as a consideration of the ways in which the past affects the present--Faulkner's perennial theme.

Depicts the story of the decadence of a Southern family, the Compsons, from four different points of view.

The second volume of Faulkner's "Snopes" trilogy, this novel continues the exploits of the ruthless and ambitious Flem Snopes. Flem moves from Frenchman's Bend to Jefferson, where he begins his scheme of taking over the town, beginning with a job at the power plant and later working at the bank. What also preoccupies him, however, is his plan for avenging his wife's infidelity.

Originally published as a series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, THE UNVANQUISHED is one of Faulkner's most conventionally written novels, and one of his most underrated. Set during the Civil War, it tells the story of Bayard Sartoris, his black friend Ringo, and Bayard's strong, determined grandmother, Rosa Millard.

The years 1942 to 1954 saw William Faulkner's rise to literary celebrity - sought after by Hollywood, lionized by the critics, awarded a Nobel Prize in 1950 and the Pulitzer and National Book Award for 1954. But despite his success, he was plagued by depression and alcohol and haunted by a sense that he had more to achieve - and a finite amount of time and energy to achieve it. This volume - the third in The Library of America's new, authoritative edition of Faulkner's complete works - collects the novels written during this crucial and fascinating period in his career. The newly restored texts, based on Faulkner's manuscripts, typescripts, and proof sheets, are free of the changes introduced by the original editors and are faithful to the author's intentions. In the four works included here, Faulkner delved deeper into themes of race and religion, and furthered his experiments with fictional structure and narrative voice; defying the odds, he continued to break new ground in American fiction. Go Down, Moses (1942) is a haunting novel made up of seven related stories that explore the intertwined lives of black, white, and Indian inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County. It includes "The Bear", one of the most famous works in all American fiction, with its evocation of "the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any recorded document". Characters from Go Down, Moses reappear in Intruder in the Dust (1948). Part detective novel, part morality tale, it is a compassionate story of a black man on trial and the growing moral awareness of a southern white boy. Requiem for a Nun (1951) is a sequel to Sanctuary. With an unusual structure combining novel and play, it tells the fate of thepassionate, haunted Temple Drake and the murder case through which she achieves a tortured redemption. Prose interludes condense millennia of local history into a swirling counterpoint. In A Fable (1954), Faulkner's recasting of the Christ story set during World War I, he wanted, he said, "to try to tell what I had found in my lifetime of truth in some important way before I had to put the pen down and die". The novel, which earned a Pulitzer Prize, is both an anguished spiritual parable and a drama of mutiny, betrayal, and violence in the barracks and on the battlefields.