University of Virginia Library

See Man Collecting: Manuscripts and Printed Works of William Faulkner in the University of Virginia Library, comp. Joan St. C. Crane and Anne E. H. Freudenberg (1975), pp. 124, 131-133. These manuscripts are hereafter designated as Virginia 1, 2, and 3, in keeping with their numbering in Man Collecting.

See Robert W. Hamblin and Louis Daniel Brodsky, Selections from the William Faulkner Collection of Louis Daniel Brodsky: A Descriptive Catalogue (1979), items 14-14d, 17. For purposes of identification the numbering of these items in this catalogue has been retained.

The other two Brodsky documents relating to "A Dead Dancer" (Hamblin and Brodsky, 14b, 14c) contain experimental lines from an unidentified poem describing summer rain. Apparently this attempt was abandoned, but several of the images and phrases (most notably, "And we sit dreaming dreams beyond the ebb and flow / Of dying years") were utilized in "A Dead Dancer."

For a description of this booklet see Hamblin and Brodsky, pp. 31-32.

Both manuscripts are written in brown ink on 14 by 8½-inch Hammermill Bond paper. (In Man Collecting the paper-size of Virginia 1 is mistakenly identified as 11 by 8½ inches.)

Both autograph drafts are written in blunt pencil; all five lines represent revisionary attempts to clarify a similar set of images.

For example, the wording of lines 3, 11, and 19. Length-of-line considerations also influenced the omission in line 13 and the addition of "And" in line 18.

What at first appear to be good possibilities for the wording of line 13 (for example, "A little nameless tune") are negated by the fact that the top stems of two adjacent letters (perhaps b, d, f, h, k, l, and/or t) are barely visible one-half inch to the left of the comma.