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Notes
Read in modified form before members of the Society on March 23, 1955. The paper has been revised for publication since that time with friendly advice and encouragement from Mr. Fredson Bowers and Mr. John Cook Wyllie.
Publication date supplied by Copyright Office, The Library of Congress. Cf. the substantiating evidence of the publisher's advertisement in Publishers' Weekly for Jan. 31, 1931, p. 556; and the announcement in the issue of Feb. 7, 1931, p. 705. The book was reviewed by John Chamberlain in The New York Times, February 15, 1931. Starke and others give the publication date of March, 1931, without supporting evidence; but this date is manifestly in error.
Starke, "An American Comedy, an Introduction to a Bibliography of William Faulkner"; The Colophon, Part 19 (1934), states 'about 2000 copies.' Daniel, A Catalogue of the Writings of William Faulkner, Yale University Library, 1942, states "2219 copies"; and this figure has been accepted here, even though no authority is cited by Daniel.
The summary of the plot as given in The Oxford Companion to American Literature contains a number of inaccuracies, so serious as to invalidate the whole.
Cowley, in his introduction to The Portable Faulkner, reads 'mechanism' for 'materialism,' an interpretation that now seems more political than literary.
Cowley is guilty of an unaccountable lapse when he asserts in his introduction to The Portable Faulkner that The Sound and the Fury was written before Sartoris, a statement that has been uncritically accepted by Howe, and others. Cowley's unsupported assertion would not seem to be susceptible of proof, particularly in view of Faulkner's own recollections as outlined in his introduction to the 1932 Modern Library Edition of Sanctuary.
Robert Cantwell, quoting an unspecified source in his introduction to the Signet Edition of Sartoris.
While the private owners of these two sets are known to the present writer, he has not been authorized to make their names public. When this paper was in proof, the writer learned that Professor Carvel Collins of M.I.T. owns the author's set of galleys with Faulkner's typed inserts and substitutions.
References to the published version in both appendices A and B are based on the first edition, or to the first Modern Library Edition, which was printed from the original plates.
Faulkner's idea that a soul may be redeemed through suffering is explicit in Requiem for a Nun. It is, moreover, neatly summarized in that book in Nancy's own words on p. 278, first edition. Mr. Carvel Collins of M. I. T. in "A Note on Sanctuary" in the November, 1951, issue of The Harvard Advocate, underscores the sometimes forgotten fact that Sanctuary merely recorded corruption, and never made it appealing, nor registered any approval.
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