Faulkner Link to Plantation Diary Discovered

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

Read more of Patricia Cohen’s New York Times article here.

There is an upcoming summer course on Faulkner taught by Claudia Traudt. Click on the title for more information and registration.

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and The Unvanquished
The Sound and the Fury is one of Faulkner’s best-known works-and perhaps his greatest. It is a superb place to begin-or to revisit-Faulkner. The erstwhile-aristocratic Compson family and the family of bedrock Dilsey which serves and sustains them are intertwined with love and hate, need, gift, dependency-as commandingly as life. Its telling, largely conveyed via the siblings Benjy, Quentin, and Jason’s personae, is complex, elusive, and ultimately revelatory. The Unvanquished, in intriguing contrast, is a very fluid read and further vivifies Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi denizens-Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, Benbows.