Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County: Geographical Fact into Fiction

Abstract

Wt TILLIAM FAULKNER (1897-i962), an outstanding twentieth-century American author, was a prolific writer who explored unique styles and literary devices. He set the best of his novels and short stories in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, which has become one of the famous fictional places in literature. Beginning with Sartoris in 1929 and ending with The Reivers in 1962,2 bit by bit, Faulkner unfolded so much concerning the people, the history, and the geography of Yoknapatawpha with such consistency that to many readers it seems to be an actual county. Robert Penn Warren has observed that geography is scrupulously though effortlessly presented in Faulkner's work, and its significance for his work is very great.3 Faulkner's prominence has resulted in a voluminous outpouring of criticism, none of which has been produced by geographers despite a growing awareness by them that fiction profoundly influences the images that people hold concerning places. This lack of evaluation is even more curious in light of the author's overt sense of geography. But lack of criticism of Faulkner's works by geographers has not resulted in lack of geographical evaluation. For more than two decades literary critics have written about the parallels between fictional Yoknapatawpha and real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and they have produced some material concerning Faulkner's geography.4 Many aspects, however, have not previously been considered, and the process