The Collected Stories of William Faulkner
by William Faulkner
Summary
Forty two stories, assembled and arranged by Faulkner himself in 1950, and the arrangement is part of the work: six themed sections, The Country, The Village, The Wilderness, The Wasteland, The Middle Ground and Beyond, that walk the reader from the hill farms of Yoknapatawpha out through the Civil War's wreckage and finally clear off the map.
The famous stories are mostly in the first two sections. Barn Burning opens The Country: a boy watching his father, a cold arsonist of other men's barns, and discovering the price of choosing justice over blood. A Rose for Emily anchors The Village, the town of Jefferson narrating its decades of polite fascination with Miss Emily Grierson and the smell nobody mentions. Around them sit That Evening Sun, Nancy waiting in her cabin for what is coming while the Compson children bicker; Red Leaves and A Justice in The Wilderness, the Chickasaw stories, slavery seen from an angle no other American writer tried; and the war and postwar stories of The Wasteland.
Read together, the sections do what the novels do, build a county with a complete history, but in portions a reader can actually manage, which makes this the honest answer to the question of where to start with Faulkner. Characters walk freely between these stories and the novels, so the collection doubles as a gazetteer of the whole territory.
Around nine hundred pages, best kept on the nightstand for months.
Best for readers who want the whole range, the horror, the comedy and the elegy, one story at a time.
Historical Context & Significance
The Collected Stories won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951, in the immediate afterglow of the Nobel Prize Faulkner had accepted in Stockholm in December 1950, and the two honours together mark the moment America's most difficult major novelist became its official one.
The collection was Faulkner's own project: he authorised it, chose the forty two stories, and devised the six section headings, so the book carries his sense of the shape of his shorter work rather than an editor's. Barn Burning had won the first O. Henry Award prize in 1939; A Rose for Emily had been his first story in a national magazine in 1930.
His two Pulitzers, for A Fable and The Reivers, honoured late and lesser novels, which makes this award the one that landed closest to the real achievement: the stories distil the same county, the same families and the same history as the great novels of 1929 to 1942, and for many readers they are the door that finally opens him.