Thinking of Home [antikvár]

Introduction "How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."—As I Lay Dying IN the spring of 1918, William Faulkner left Oxford, Mississippi, for a ten-week stay in New Haven, Connecticut, with his friend Phil Stone. He was twenty years old. It was his first extended absence from home. Thus began an extensive correspondence with his mother and father that continued on succeeding trips through 1925: to Canada with the Royal Air Force (July to December 1918); to New Haven and New York (October to December 1921); to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast (January to July 1925); and to Europe (August to December 1925). His 145 letters, postcards, and telegrams to his parents from the first four of those trips, and from the last six weeks of his European journey, are published here for the first time, with his earliest extant letter, from Oxford in 1912. They are the letters of a young man coming of age. Overflowing with the stuff of his everyday life, they range from outpourings of feeling for his "Darling Momsey" to more confident self-representations of the dutiful son. The majority precede but look forward to Faulkner's earliest sense of himself as a serious artist; those from New Orleans and Europe in 1925 trace his intellectual and imaginative awakening as a first novelist. As a group, they provide a picture of Faulkner at a time in his life about which less has been known than any other.