New Orleans Sketches (1958)

Summary

Alfred Kazin. “Faulkner Forecast.” New York Times Book Review, March 2, 1958, pp. 4–5.

Once upon a time–1925–there was an unknown American writer whose name was William Faulkner. In that far-off day there was no Faulkner Studies Associations; no academic conclaves were held to hunt down symbol and image in his work, and he gave no comfort to the ghost of Jefferson Davis. He was not merely a heavily neo-Swinburnian poet; but he lived in bohemian quarters in New Orleans writing compassionate sketches for the Sunday features section of the Times-Picayune about crippled beggars, jockeys, bootleggers, idiots, Italian shoemakers, desperate Negroes. He had a passion for low company and an enormous admiration for Sherwood Anderson, who also lived in New Orleans at the time, and whose tender little story, “I'm a Fool,” Faulkner ranked with Conrad's Heart of Darkness as the two finest stories he had ever read.

Under the influence of Anderson–and of artists and literary friends in New Orleans who were trying to escape the heavy scent of magnolia–the poet from the wastes of north Mississippi, who had tried everything and who was regarded back home as a failure and wastrel, now became, through the traditional opening step for American writers of newspaper sketches, a writer of prose and soon of fiction.

These sketches–most of them are from the Times-Picayune but some were first published in a famous New Orleans literary magazine of the Twenties, The Double-Dealer–are apprentice work, and the first ones are pretty bad.