Afternoon of a Cow Original Typed Manuscript Drafts.
$15,000 · Offered by Biblio
First edition
Three original typed drafts of William Faulkner's parodical short story "Afternoon of a Cow. By Ernest V. Trueblood." Two complete copies, each 17 leaves; bound with brass clasps in green folders with the third copy lacking the first leaf; with 49 strikethroughs in Faulkner's hand throughout most excising a single word. When Faulkner returned to Oxford at the end of World War I, he was writing poetry, much of it under the influence of the French Symbolists. In the summer of 1919, he borrowed Mallarmé's title, "L'Après-midi d'un Faune," for a 40-line poem of frustrated love. The poem appeared in The New Republicon 16 August was a revised version appeared in The Mississippian at Ole Miss in the fall. Early the next year he was to publish in Oxford a poem inviting comparison with François Villon, "Une Ballade des Femmes Perdues." As Joseph Blotner says diplomatically, "Such poetry unsurprisingly provoked various responses." Parodies began to appear in The Mississippian. One was "Une Ballade d'une Vache Perdue," signed by "Lordgreyson." The poem described the heifer Betsey, lost and wandering far from home. "It was an amusing tour de force, which Faulkner may have had in mind seventeen years later, 'one afternoon,' he recalled, 'when I felt rotten with a terrible hangover.' He was then working unhappily at Twentieth Century-Fox" (Blotner). "The story generates interest because it uses Faulkner himself as a character, much in the manner of a post-modernist writer such as Paul Aust
- Edition: First Edition
- Binding: unknown
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