FAULKNER, William.

£3,000 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Sartoris. First edition, first printing, of Faulkner's first Yoknapatawpha novel, rare in the jacket. Sartoris was the only part of Flags in the Dust to be published during Faulkner's lifetime. He told his publisher: "At last and certainly, I have written THE book, of which those other things were but foals. I believe it is the damdest [sic] best book you'll look at this year, and any other publisher" (quoted by Weinstein, p. 25). He had completed the novel in 1927, but his publisher edited the text down substantially: the full text was not published until 1973, over a decade after Faulkner's death.It was Faulkner's debut as a Southern writer, drawing on a roster of types, "ranging from garrulous old white men to deranged white youths and low-lives, as well as to a hill-country family nestled in the backwoods and steeped in earlier ways. And this is not to mention its three generations of black servants managing to eke out their lives under inattentive white masters" (ibid, p. 24).

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