ABSTRACT
Those who know William Faulkner only as a novelist know him less well than those who know him chiefly from the magazines, and as a writer of short stories. Though it is with his novels that Faulkner has won his fame, and for them that he has been accorded critical consideration-because ofthem indeed, that many ofhis stories, previously rejected, have been published-it is in the stories that we discern most clearly Mr. Faulkner's purpose to produce a comedy, following the precedent set by such novelists as Balzac (his favorite author), Cabell, Galsworthy and Van Vechten. The novels are the major chronicles of the world of his comedy, but the short stories form a chain by which the novels are bound. And as story has succeeded story, it has become increasingly evident that Mr. Faulkner's world was one carefully conceived from the beginning and is both varied and conceivably real.
