Reader’s Guide to William Faulkner

The new guide - the first comprehensive book of its kind - offers analyses of all Faulkner’s short stories, published and unpublished, that were not incorporated into novels or turned into chapters of a novel. Seventy-one stories receive individual critical analysis and evaluation. These discussions reveal the relationship of the stories to the novels and point up Faulkner’s skills as a writer of short fiction. Although Faulkner often spoke disparagingly of the short story form and claimed that he wrote stories for money - which be did - Edmond L. Volpe’s study reveals that Faulkner could not escape even in this shorter form his incomparable fictional imagination not his mastery of narrative structure and technique.