Although annual surveys of Faulkner scholarship, one of the few booming industries in any recession, have regularly called for more attention to the short stories, the results so far have been paltry. True, there have been encouraging signs: essays dealing with such minor works as "Uncle Willie," "Artist at Home," "The Priest," and "Mistral." There have been helpful explications of "Carcassonne" and more critiques of masterpieces such as "Dry September" and "That Evening Sun." I must point out nevertheless that there has been no effort to address the major problems touching William Faulkner's peculiar affiliation with a genre from which he learned more than from all his verse or his first two novels. The third taught him most of all—when it was rejected. So far there has been no mention of the existence of that puzzling group of tales about Memphis which are the subject of this essay.

As they reveal, he found short stories harder to write than any other kind. Too often a tale eventuated in a novel, or nothing at all. By 1930, though—very early in this lateblooming artist's career—his best stories were turning out to be a better medium for writing poetry than his verse had ever been. For him as for many gifted Americans—Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Melville leap to mind—the lack of a grand American poetic tradition proved a crippling limitation. For all their genius as wordsmiths, the best they could hope for in verse was a limpid mediocrity. Their two or three real poems happened as accidents.

The short story, so eloquent in the hands of masters like Gogol, de Maupassant, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, was better suited to American habits. Like the hamburger, it fit the