Introduction

Summary

Faulkner's first book, The Marble Faun, issued on December 15, 1924, was a subsidized publication from what we have come to call a vanity press. Of course, he was not the first major American writer to begin his career in print that way, since Walt Whitman not only self-published but even helped set the type himself for the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855. Unlike Whitman, however, Faulkner did not have to write his own first review. Indeed, as far as we know, there were at least three–a brief mixed notice in the Saturday Review of Literature and two lengthier appreciations. Monte Cooper in the Memphis Commercial Appeal found the book-length poem derivative from the British Romantics and certainly no better than his mentors' works, but fellow writer John McClure in the New Orleans Times-Picayune, probably out of friendship more than critical objectivity, offered high praise for a beginning performance and called Faulkner a “born poet, with remarkable ability.” This was a writer, McClure correctly prophesied, “from whom we shall hear a great deal in [the] future,” so we can praise McClure's ability to recognize a major talent in embryo, despite the unspectacular first step.

The next book, Soldiers' Pay (published February 25, 1926), was a novel issued by a respectable New York firm, Boni and Liveright. Writing under the inspiration, if not the tutelage, of Sherwood Anderson, with the encouragement of the community of writers in which Faulkner was living in New Orleans, gathered around the little magazine the Double Dealer, Faulkner had his eye on the contemporary literary marketplace then dominated by the satiric authors of the jazz age.