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John Wesley Thompson Falkner, III, who upon the publication of his novel Men Working in 1941 adopted the spelling of the family name made famous by his older brother William, published eight novels, a few stories and articles, and a volume of reminiscences. He left in addition, at his death in 1963, a considerable body of unpublished work. The first three of his published novels were widely reviewed; we have not listed reviews here since the significant ones are accessible in standard reference works. But the last five novels, representing his mature art, were published between 1951 and 1960 in paperbacks and scarcely noticed. To our knowledge, the only serious review of any of the series was an account of the first, Cabin Road, by Harry Serwer in The Freeman, XIII (March 24, 1952), 415. According to the publisher's estimates, total sales of these five books mounted, however, to between 2,000,000 and 2,500,000. Nevertheless, they are already rare. John Faulkner came to notice again with the posthumous publication in 1963 of My Brother Bill, the volume of reminiscences; but aside from this the only work by him now in print is his second novel to be published, Dollar Cotton, which first appeared in 1942.[1]
John Faulkner's papers, including manuscripts of all the published works as well as the unpublished ones, have now been deposited by Mrs. Faulkner in the Mississippi Valley Collection of the John Willard Brister Library at Memphis State University. Our work with the papers, however, was carried out through the courtesy of Mrs. Faulkner while they were still kept in an old quilt chest at the Faulkner residence in Oxford, Mississippi.
The value of John Faulkner's work for the student of literature must lie primarily in its own merits but also in its being a second and distinctive treatment of the Matter of Lafayette County. Beginning about 1938, he tried different approaches to the hill types of Beat Two, the northeastern part of the county. From the tragic, the macabre, the naturalistic, and the sentimental, he developed at length a pure humorous style in the last five novels.
These, beginning with Cabin Road (1951), comprise a series in which the pervasive comic theme is the mutually uncomprehending relationship of the natives of Beat Two and the modern American State. We regret that
Faulkner's humor is in the tradition of the Old Southwest. We find that it meets every criterion of the genre as defined in recent scholarship and, more important, that it succeeds in the aim which has always been dominant in the genre — to raise a hearty laugh. As reviewers observed of Men Working, in which the humor is often macabre in contrast to the sheer good humor of the last novels, the humor is free of condescension and brutality, which have marked many of the earlier tales of the Old Southwest. Faulkner sets up a contest in human fecklessness between his natives, on the one hand, and townsmen and representatives of the Government, on the other, and keeps the hands even.
John Faulkner's Beat Six — the Cabin Road world grounded in the actual Beat Two — will inevitably suggest comparison with William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. John's creation is more limited in every way than William's, but within the limitations John achieved independent distinction. Even comparison with the humorous passages in William Faulkner, which have themselves been appreciated as superlative instances of the Old Southwest kind, or with William Faulkner's treatment of Cabin Road types such as the Snopes clan, shows, in our opinion, marked distinctions of style, tone, and purpose. Some of John's unpublished work, especially the novel "Beat Six" and a local history entitled "Mississippi Hill Country," provides background not only for John's published fiction but for some of William's as well.
Students of bibliography will be particularly interested in John Faulkner's publication history. With the shift from hardback to paperback books which occurred with the publication of Cabin Road, his career was radically affected. No doubt the circumstance that William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature at that time and certain other circumstances contributed to the eclipse of John's reputation, but the chief cause seems to have been the practice of not noticing paperbacks whose quality was disguised by garish covers and cheap prices. The appearance of John Faulkner's novels in an ephemeral, popular format is, however, one of the characteristics they have in common with their nineteenth-century predecessors in Old Southwest humor.
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