Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) - Hardcover

Doyle, Don H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807826154 ISBN 13: 9780807826157

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001

Synopsis

Lafayette County, Mississippi, was the primary inspiration for what is arguably the most famous place in American fiction: William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner once explained that in his Yoknapatawpha stories he "sublimated the actual into the apocryphal." This history of Lafayette County reverses that notion, using Faulkner's rich fictional portrait of a place and its people to illuminate the past.

From the arrival of Europeans in Chickasaw Indian territory in 1540 to Faulkner's death in 1962, Don Doyle chronicles more than four centuries of local history. He traces the building of a permanent community and plantation economy by white settlers, the lives of slaves in the region, the experiences of secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction, town life in Oxford, and the "Revolt of the Rednecks" Faulkner captured in his saga of the Snopes clan.

Drawing on both history and literature, Doyle renders a rich and deeply researched portrait of Faulkner's home. "Yoknapatawpha was a place of the imagination, invented by Faulkner as a vehicle for developing a coherent body of fiction," Doyle writes, "but the raw materials from which he created this place and its people lay right at his front porch."

About this title

Book Description:

"Remarkable. . . . A highly readable history of Lafayette County. . . . An important interpretation of one of the greatest American novelists and a major contribution to the history of the South."-- Journal of Southern History

About the Author:

Don H. Doyle, McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, is author of New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0807826154
• ISBN 13: 9780807826157
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 488