Its first five pages introduce and develop a character named Popeye, who already is recognizable as the Popeye in Faulkner's fourth Yoknapatawpha novel, Sanctuary, though there Faulkner relocates him from New Orleans to Memphis. It has, however, several claims on our attention. All five of the periodicals Faulkner sent it to rejected the story. The inserted page '4-A' indicates that this was a revised typescript, and the way he typed his name and new address on the first page tells us this typescript was prepared to submit to the magazines. Below are the first ten pages of the unpublished 37-page typescript of 'The Big Shot,' which Faulkner wrote in the mid- to late-1920s.

The documentary track of that process stretches back at least a decade, probably even before Faulkner's decision to move from New Orleans to Oxford and to start writing stories about the imaginary place he eventually decided to call Yoknapatawpha.

But that manuscript came late in the long creative process behind the novel. Faulkner's final manuscript version of the novel, for example, is in the Harry Ransome Center at the University of Texas, and unavailable to us. Here we'll look at some of the pre-texts that contributed to Absalom, though we are missing some important pieces. (Typical too is the way Faulkner seems to have forgotten Shreve's original last name - it is McKenzie, not McCannon - and confused Luster, who was not born until after Quentin's death, with one of his uncles, Versh or T.P.) How readers should understand the intertextual relationship between these two great novels is one of the most provocative questions in Faulkner criticism. The most obvious of these is The Sound and the Fury, where three of Absalom's narrators - Quentin Compson, his father, and his Harvard roommate Shreve - had all appeared earlier, along with Luster, the young black servant in the Compson household. The following items are drawn from the William Faulkner Foundation Collection at the University of Virginia's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library ( ).Ĭlick on any image to see an enlargement.Ĭonsidered by many not just Faulkner's greatest book but also the supreme achievement of American Modernist fiction, Absalom, Absalom! is at the same time typical in the way Faulkner constructed it from a number of his earlier published and unpublished texts.

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