Faulkner’s Yoknapatawphs stories–a fascinating blend of complex Latinate prose and primitive Southern dialect–paint an extraordinary portrait of a community bound together by ties of blood, by a shared belief in moral “verities,” and by an old grief, the Civil War. But Faulkner was no Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind), for although his stories elegize the agrarian virtues of the Old South, they nevertheless look unflinchingly at that world’s tragic flaw: the “peculiar institution” of slavery. His fiction thus immerses us in the memories and traumas of the Old South.

Faulkner’s characters are often embittered by seeing their values threatened in an uprooted modern world. They are often country people trying to live “off by themselves”–to