The Forgiven Faulkner

Extract

In those days in the French Quarter of New Orleans there were among others men who were giants among the nation's creative great and some who would become giants or nearly so, men like Sherwood Anderson and Oliver LaFarge and the poet John McClure and Lyle Saxon and Roark Bradford whose delightful genius had not yet had its due. And, briefly, William Faulkner. All of them are dead now.

But in those days they were not dead, and some of them kept the Quarter very much alive with their pranks and penchants and their predilection for a sort of Bohemianism that seemed natural and even proper there and then. For the most part they commanded the admiration of the neophytes, we who were very young reporters or hopeless scribblers and others not yet ready to have a try at the one or the other but only students who prowled the Quarter in search of some famed face and maybe an introduction and a word or two.