Faulkner's County - (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies) by Don H Doyle (Paperback)

About the Book

This history of Lafayette County, Mississippi, uses William 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, Doyle chronicles more than four centuries of local history. 27 illustrations. 3 maps.

Book 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."

Review Quotes

Don Doyle has achieved what almost no other scholar could do so brilliantly--he has shown just how immersed the great writer was in his family's and his region's tangled and tragic past. (Bertram Wyatt-Brown, University of Florida)

In "Faulkner's County" Doyle gives us a close and telling history of the culture that produced both the art and the artist. It deepens greatly our understanding of Faulkner's universe and, by that way, ourselves. (Joel Williamson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

It is the work of a mature scholar and a major achievement. Doyle's book is a sophisticated study, the product of a historian skilled in solid research and well aware of major historiographical themes. ("The Southern Register")

No one has done a better job of tracing the history of this otherwise obscure quarter of north Mississippi from the 16th century-when DeSoto came upon the Chickasaws-to the early 20th. (Raleigh "News and Observer")

Readers will come away from this wonderful book with a much deeper understanding of Faulkner and the South. ("Choice")

In "Faulkner's County Doyle gives us a close and telling history of the culture that produced both the art and the artist. It deepens greatly our understanding of Faulkner's universe and, by that way, ourselves. (Joel Williamson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)