Faulkner's Inheritance

<p>Essays by Susan V. Donaldson Lael Gold Adam Gussow Martin Kreiswirth Jay Parini Noel Polk Judith L. Sensibar Jon Smith and Priscilla Wald</p><p>William Faulkner once said that the writer "collects his material all his life from everything he reads from everything he listens to everything he sees and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box." Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example he referred to the South as "not very important to me. I just happen to know it and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time." His Christian background according to him was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to "the lumber room" that would help him tell a story.</p><p>Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's <em>Ulysses</em> or had never heard of Thomas Mann--writers he would elsewhere declare as "the two great men in my time." Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: "I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't."</p><p>Nevertheless Faulkner's life was rich in what he did saw and read and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. <em>Faulkner's Inheritance</em> is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction including his own family history Jim Crow laws contemporary fashion popular culture and literature.</p><p>Joseph R. Urgo is dean of the faculty at Hamilton College. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.</p>