Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner
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Position in the vault
This note is backed by a local extracted source and remains part of the vault's crosslinked book layer.
Core concepts
- Knowledge Preservation: Blotner's edition preserves Faulkner's workshop through typed scripts, magazine versions, variant notes, repositories, agent files, and later novel absorption.
- Language and Ideology: retitling, profanity cuts, paragraphing, narrator changes, and name changes show revision as a change in what a story can say and what social reality it can make visible.
- Commercial Society: The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's, Harper's Bazaar, agents, editors, and house style reveal literary production as a commercial system shaping which Faulkner stories became public.
Detailed overview
Joseph Blotner's edition is not a miscellaneous dump of Faulkner leftovers. It arranges the material by textual fate: stories that Faulkner published and then revised into later books, stories he published but never gathered into his own collections, and completed stories left unpublished at the time the edition went to press. That structure makes the volume a workshop record as much as a story collection, because the reader can watch Yoknapatawpha episodes, New Orleans sketches, aviation material, Snopes stories, McCaslin hunting stories, and European travel pieces move between magazine, typescript, manuscript, and novel.
The first part is the most visibly genetic. "Ambuscade," "Retreat," "Raid," "Skirmish at Sartoris," "The Unvanquished," and "Vendee" are magazine-stage versions of material that becomes The Unvanquished, with Bayard, Ringo, Rosa Millard, Drusilla, John Sartoris, Loosh, Joby, Grumby, and the burned world around Jefferson already present but not yet fully embedded in the novel's sectional design. The same part tracks Snopes and McCaslin material into The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses through "Fool About a Horse," "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," "The Hound," "Spotted Horses," "Lion," "The Old People," "A Point of Law," "Gold Is Not Always," "Pantaloon in Black," "Delta Autumn," and "The Bear."
The second part is stranger because the stories are finished magazine works that did not find a later book-home. "Nympholepsy" follows a laborer from a dusty road, a courthouse town, wheat fields, a stream, and a moonlit pursuit into an encounter with desire and terror. "Frankie and Johnny" turns a street-corner tough, a prize-fighter father, a drowned rescue, a garage job, a hard mother, and waterfront imagery into a compressed city romance. Other pieces such as "The Priest," the two "Once Aboard the Lugger" stories, "Miss Zilphia Gant," "Thrift," "Idyll in the Desert," "Two Dollar Wife," "Afternoon of a Cow," "Mr. Acarius," and "Sepulture South: Gaslight" widen the book beyond Yoknapatawpha into early stylistic experiments, comic commerce, melodrama, and commissioned magazine prose.
The third part is the strongest record of Faulkner before and between the canonical books. "Adolescence" follows Juliet Bunden from Joe Bunden's rough household to her grandmother's creek-bottom life with Lee Hollowell, while "Don Giovanni," "Peter," and "Moonlight" preserve New Orleans and early courtship experiments. "The Big Shot" and "Dull Tale" show Popeye, Temple Drake, Thomas Sutpen, Wash Jones, Flem Snopes, Gail Hightower, Horace Benbow, and Joe Christmas emerging in rougher forms. "Evangeline" is especially important because it moves through Don and an "I" narrator, then Chisholm and Burke, before becoming Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon's route into Absalom, Absalom!
Blotner's notes make the volume unusually useful for reading Faulkner's revision practice. They name repositories such as Rowan Oak papers at the University of Mississippi Library, the University of Virginia Library's Faulkner collections, the New York Public Library, Jill Faulkner Summers's archive, Dorothy Commins's archive, and the Newberry Library. They also name agents and editors such as Morton Goldman, Harold Ober, Graeme Lorimer, Bennett Cerf, and Albert Erskine, showing how magazine refusal, Post house style, Scribner's publication, Random House plans, and Faulkner's own serial recycling shaped what became novels, collected stories, and abandoned experiments.
The book belongs beside the other Faulkner notes because it shows how much of the published Yoknapatawpha architecture was assembled by reuse. The Snopes trilogy, The Unvanquished, Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, Sanctuary, Mosquitoes, Soldiers' Pay, The Wild Palms, Sartoris, and A Fable are not only later destinations; they are pressure points inside the shorter pieces. Reading this volume is like watching Faulkner test narrators, names, family relations, violent episodes, comic voices, plantation memories, and racial arrangements before deciding which form could bear the weight.
Source links
Section-by-section notes
Introduction
Summary: Blotner defines the edition as three groups: published stories never reprinted in Faulkner's collections, stories later revised into books, and completed unpublished stories. He excludes Collected Stories, Knight's Gambit, incomplete pieces such as "Love" and "And Now What's to Do?," unchanged magazine excerpts such as "The Waifs" and "Hell Creek Crossing," and separate handmade works such as The Wishing Tree, Mayday, and The Marionettes. He explains that unpublished texts come from Faulkner-typed scripts, that published texts come from magazines or monographs, that surviving typescripts are collated with magazine versions, that substantive variants are described in the Notes, and that the revised-for-books stories are printed in magazine order rather than composition order. Source anchors: three kinds, Knight's Gambit, The Wishing Tree, Faulkner-typed scripts, magazine versions, Notes.
Analysis: The "three kinds" division gives the volume its working method, because every piece is read according to what Faulkner later did or did not do with it. Knight's Gambit, The Wishing Tree, and "The Waifs" clarify the editorial boundary: Blotner is not trying to gather every stray text, only completed stories whose versions alter the map of Faulkner's fiction. Faulkner-typed scripts, magazine versions, and the Notes make knowledge preservation central, so the collection asks the reader to compare stages of making rather than consume the stories as isolated curiosities.
Part I: Stories Revised for Later Books
Summary: Part I gathers stories that became parts of The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, Big Woods, and The Mansion. The Unvanquished group includes "Ambuscade," "Retreat," "Raid," "Skirmish at Sartoris," "The Unvanquished," and "Vendee," with Bayard, Ringo, Loosh, Philadelphy, Rosa Millard, John Sartoris, Drusilla, Uncle Buck, Uncle Buddy McCaslin, Grumby, the old compress, and the burned world around Jefferson moving from magazine stories into novel chapters. The Hamlet group includes "Fool About a Horse," "Lizards in Jamshyd's Courtyard," "The Hound," and "Spotted Horses," carrying V. K. Suratt or Ratliff, Ab Snopes, Pat Stamper, Henry Armstid, Uncle Dick the dowser, Flem Snopes, the Old Frenchman place, Varner's store, and Frenchman's Bend into Snopes material. The Go Down, Moses and hunting material includes "Lion," "The Old People," "A Point of Law," "Gold Is Not Always," "Pantaloon in Black," "Delta Autumn," "The Bear," and "Race at Morning," while "Hog Pawn" points toward The Mansion. Source anchors: The Unvanquished, Vendee, Fool About a Horse, Old Frenchman place, Lion, Pantaloon in Black, Hog Pawn.
Analysis: The Unvanquished and Vendee material shows Faulkner expanding a magazine Civil War sequence into a family-and-region novel by adding structure, kinship detail, and harsher consequences around Bayard, Ringo, Rosa Millard, and Grumby. "Fool About a Horse," the Old Frenchman place, Ratliff, Ab Snopes, and Flem Snopes show language changing through revision: renaming and retelling turn comic local speech into a larger account of Snopes invasion. "Lion," "Pantaloon in Black," "Delta Autumn," and "The Bear" place the McCaslin hunting and race materials in their earlier story forms, making Go Down, Moses visible as a book assembled from related but differently weighted acts of revision.
Part II: Uncollected Stories
Summary: Part II prints published stories that Faulkner had not gathered into his own books, beginning with "Nympholepsy," where a laborer leaves a day of wheat work, passes a courthouse town, follows a woman or girl through woods, falls into a stream, touches a submerged body, crosses moonlit wheat, and returns toward labor, hunger, dust, and town lights. "Frankie and Johnny" begins with Frankie's prize-fighter father, his death while saving a fat bather at Ocean Grove Park, Johnny's street-corner approach, the slap outside an ex-saloon, an alley reconciliation, a waterfront image of ferry boats, Frankie's mother, a garage job, old Ryan the cop, and the mother's bitter lesson about money and men. The section also includes "The Priest," "Once Aboard the Lugger (I)," "Once Aboard the Lugger (II)," "Miss Zilphia Gant," "Thrift," "Idyll in the Desert," "Two Dollar Wife," "Afternoon of a Cow," "Mr. Acarius," and "Sepulture South: Gaslight," whose note traces Anthony West, Walker Evans's cemetery photograph, Harper's Bazaar, and Faulkner's September 1954 New York stay. Source anchors: Nympholepsy, wheat field, Frankie and Johnny, Ocean Grove Park, Once Aboard the Lugger, Sepulture South, Walker Evans.
Analysis: "Nympholepsy," the wheat field, the stream, and the courthouse town show Faulkner experimenting with sensory pursuit and rural dread without needing the Yoknapatawpha family machinery of the revised stories. "Frankie and Johnny," Ocean Grove Park, the ex-saloon, the waterfront ferries, and the garage job move the volume into urban vernacular and popular-romance materials that Faulkner could finish but not easily absorb into the later Mississippi books. "Once Aboard the Lugger," "Sepulture South," Anthony West, and Walker Evans show the variety of the uncollected category, from paired narrative experiments to a commissioned prose response to a cemetery photograph.
Part III: Unpublished Stories
Summary: Part III collects completed stories that remained unpublished when Blotner edited the volume, starting with "Adolescence," where Juliet Bunden is born to Joe Bunden and a displaced, genteel mother, renamed Jule by a hostile stepmother, sent to her grandmother, and then spends a creek-bottom childhood swimming, hunting, fishing, bundling in a horse blanket, and quarreling over Lee Hollowell. Other early or transitional works include "Al Jackson," tied to Sherwood Anderson and tall-tale letters; "Don Giovanni," written from 624 Orleans Alley in New Orleans and carrying Herbie, Morrison, Miss Steinbauer, William Spratling, Prufrock echoes, and future Mosquitoes material; "Peter," shaped by Spratling sketching trips; and "Moonlight," whose Robert Binford, George, and Cecily anticipate Soldiers' Pay. The section also includes "The Big Shot," with Popeye, Wrennie Martin, Dal Martin, Thomas Sutpen, Wash Jones, Flem Snopes, and Gail Hightower prefigurations; "Dull Tale," a reworking that changes point of view and ending; "A Return," developed from "Rose of Lebanon" around Gavin Blount and Lewis Randolph; "A Dangerous Man," linked to Estelle Faulkner and Murry Falkner; "Evangeline," moving toward Absalom, Absalom! through Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon; "A Portrait of Elmer"; "With Caution and Dispatch"; and "Snow." Source anchors: Adolescence, Juliet Bunden, 624 Orleans Alley, The Big Shot, Dull Tale, Evangeline, Quentin and Shreve.
Analysis: "Adolescence," Juliet Bunden, Lee Hollowell, and the grandmother's intervention show an early Faulkner testing female adolescence, bodily freedom, and rural authority before those materials harden into later family structures. 624 Orleans Alley, "Don Giovanni," "Peter," William Spratling, and "Moonlight" document the New Orleans apprenticeship behind Mosquitoes and Soldiers' Pay, with urban dialogue and artistic self-caricature still exposed. "The Big Shot," "Dull Tale," "Evangeline," Quentin and Shreve, and the Sutpen parallels make preservation interpretive rather than merely archival, because abandoned stories reveal how point of view was recast into the narrative machinery of major novels.
Notes and Bibliography
Summary: The Notes identify repositories and publication histories rather than merely documenting sources. Blotner uses abbreviations for Dorothy Commins Private Archive, Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, New Orleans Sketches, the University of Virginia Library's Faulkner Collections, Jill Faulkner Summers Private Archive, the New York Public Library, and Rowan Oak papers at the University of Mississippi Library. The notes then track magazine appearances in The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, The American Mercury, Collier's, Redbook, The American Magazine, The Woman's Home Companion, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune, while naming agents and editors such as Morton Goldman, Harold Ober, Graeme Lorimer, Bennett Cerf, Albert Erskine, Anthony West, and Walker Evans. They record manuscript and typescript sizes, deleted passages, restored lines, changes in profanity, new paragraphing, bracketed material, story retitling, rejected submissions, and later absorption into The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, Mosquitoes, Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Sartoris, and A Fable. Source anchors: ROUM, FCVA, Saturday Evening Post, Harold Ober, Graeme Lorimer, bracketed material, retitling.
Analysis: ROUM, FCVA, NYPL, and the private archives make the edition a map of where Faulkner's working papers physically survived, which matters because several stories can only be understood through manuscript and typescript comparison. The Saturday Evening Post, Harold Ober, Graeme Lorimer, and Bennett Cerf show commercial society shaping revisions, refusals, and retitling, not just a solitary artist perfecting prose. Bracketed material, profanity cuts, paragraph changes, and later absorption into The Hamlet or Absalom, Absalom! give concrete evidence for Faulkner's revision practice, turning the Notes into one of the book's main interpretive sections.