Variety magazine reported in January that actor/director Sean Penn and Phoenix Pictures will team to film an adaptation of As I Lay Dying in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford and Lafayette County. Penn will star in the film and will produce with Michael Fitzgerald and Gene Kirkwood. 
The film will be directed by Jerzy Kromolowski, who adapted the novel with his wife, Mary Olson-Kromolowski. Filming is scheduled for late spring of 1998. This will be the first adaptation of a Faulkner novel since 1969, when Steve McQueen starred in a film version of The Reivers. 

Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference co-founder Evans Harrington dead at 72

Evans Harrington, a former chair of the English Department at the University of Mississippi, died December 1, 1997, after a lengthy illness. He was 72. As a professor at Ole Miss in Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown, he founded the Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference with Ann Abadie in 1974, as a way for scholars and fans of Faulkner to meet and discuss Faulkner. It proved to be so successful that the entire conference had to be repeated for a second week to meet demand. Since then, the conference has been an annual affair, with proceedings beginning with the third conference published by the University Press of Mississippi. He served as conference director for 20 years. 
A veteran of the U.S. Navy who served in World War II, Harrington published four novels, numerous short stories, articles and scholarly papers, two musicals and one play. His family requests that memorials be made to the Evans Harrington Creative Writing Scholarship Fund, c/o The University of Mississippi.

Obituary, from Annotations Online (English Department Newsletter)

	Obituary: Evans Harrington
	Faulkner Statue Dedicated in Oxford
	University, Other Centennial Celebrations
	New Faulkner Books
	Faulkner on the Internet
	From the Author

View the most recent announcements on the main page. Past announcements also are available. Check The Carriage House for other Faulkner web sites and other sites of interest from around the world. If you know of any Faulkner-related news item, please let me know. 

The statue of Faulkner by sculptor William Beckwith.  
 

A bronze life-size statue of Faulkner in front of the Oxford City Hall was dedicated on September 25, 1997, the 100th anniversary of his birth in New Albany, Mississippi. On hand at the dedication ceremony in the Oxford courthouse square were fellow Mississippi writers Shelby Foote and Willie Morris. Delivering the keynote address was the Honorable John Brademas, President Emeritus of New York University and former member of Congress. The Right Reverend A.C. Marble Jr., Bishop, Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi, also spoke.

The statue, sculpted by local artist William Beckwith, features Faulkner seated on a park bench holding his pipe and wearing his trademark tweed jacket and fedora hat.

The statue was the subject of controversy in Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown from 1903 until his death in 1962, when Faulkner family members objected to the project as contrary to what Faulkner would have wanted. The inherently shy Faulkner shunned publicity. The already controversial project was further complicated when city work crews cut down a magnolia tree in front of the City Hall to make room for the statue. A number of Oxford residents were upset over the unannounced early morning tree cutting. Then-mayor John Leslie reportedly claimed he had the right to order the tree cut since it was he who had planted the tree in the first place.

The University of Mississippi also celebrated Faulkner’s 100th birthday with a program of readings and tributes, which included comments by the Right Reverend Duncan Montgomery Gray Jr., Bishop Emeritus, Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi; Professors Evans Harrington and Donald Kartiganer; Richard Howorth, owner of Square Books in Oxford; and Oxford author Larry Brown.

Union County and the city of New Albany hosted a three-day Faulkner festival that featured dramatic presentations, scholarly talks, art exhibits, an arts and crafts festival, gospel, bluegrass, country, and blues music, and a birthday celebration on the courthouse lawn.

The city of Charlottesville, Virginia, where Faulkner spent much of the last years of his life as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, celebrated the Faulkner centennial with birthday cake, a talk by university librarian Karin Wittenborg, and free Faulkner T-shirts, courtesy of Vintage Press.

Traveling Exhibit: Martin J.Dain Photographs

"Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain" has begun its schedule of regional exhibitions. Sponsored by the Mississippi Humanities Council and the Appalachian Regional Comission, the exhibit includes 40 black and white photographs taken by Dain between 1961 and 1963. The accompanying text was written by Oxford author Larry Brown.

Contrapuntal in Integration: A Study of Three Faulkner Short Story Volumes, by Lisa Olson Paddock (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1998).  

Detective Dupin Reads William Faulkner: Solutions to Six Yoknapatawpha Mysteries, by Charles Chappell (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1997). Purchase (Paperback) from Amazon.com  

Faulkner and Gender, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha 1994, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors, by Lothar Honnighausen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997).  Purchase from Amazon.com  

Faulkner in Cultural Context, edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 1995, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997). Purchase (Paperback) from Amazon.com  

Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed, by Doreen Fowler (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

Faulkner’s Literary Children: Patterns of Development, by David L. Vanderwerken (New York: P. Lang, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

Faulkner’s Place, by Michael Millgate (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

Faulkner’s World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain (Faulkner Centennial edition, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution, by Richard Godden (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  
 

Novelistic Love in the Platonic Tradition: Fielding, Faulkner, and the Postmodernists, by Jennie Wang (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). Purchase (Paperback) from Amazon.com  

Readings on William Faulkner, edited by Clarice Swisher (The Greenhaven Press Literary Companion to American Authors, San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1997). Purchase (Paperback) from Amazon.com  

Son of Sorrow: The Life, Works, and Influence of Colonel William C. Falkner, 1825-1889, by Donald Philip Duclos (San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1998). Purchase (Paperback) from Amazon.com  

Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner (Faulkner Centennial edition, New York: Vintage International, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, edited by Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). Purchase (Paperback) from Amazon.com  

William Faulkner: His Life and Work, by David Minter (Faulkner Centennial edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, by Daniel Joseph Singal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Purchase from Amazon.com  

William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, edited by Harold Bloom (Modern Critical Interpretations, Philadelphia, PA: Chelsea House Publishers, 1998). Purchase from Amazon.com  
 
 

	The University of Delaware, William Faulkner: A Centenary Celebration (online exhibits).
	The University of Maryland, Literary Manuscripts (list of manuscripts maintained by the library).
	The University of Michigan, William Faulkner: The First 100 Years (online exhibits).
	The University of Virginia, The William Faulkner Collections and the "Most Faulknerian" exhibit at the Alderman Library.

Collecting Faulkner:
     Randall House in Santa Barbara, California, has a selection of rare Faulkner items for sale. I have also received Email from Book Look, which claims to be "America's largest out-of-print book search service." They may be helpful in tracking down any of the several out-of-print books by or about Faulkner.

Faulkner Quotations:
     This web page collects together a number of quotations attributed to Faulkner and published in American Literary Anecdotes.

     Gateway! New Orleans features this William Faulkner article, which looks as if it may have come from one of the Gale Research, Inc., guides (such as the Contemporary Authors series). It's somewhat unclear from the page, but the article may been written by Faulkner scholar Thomas L. McHaney.

     New York University School of Medicine's "Medical Humanities database" features an entry on Faulkner and a brief article on his novel As I Lay Dying, presumably for the novel's "lesson in mankind's ability to survive most anything, and then 'get on with living.'"
Finally in the "miscellaneous" category, the Catfish Institute awarded the Taylor Grocery & Restaurant (otherwise known as "Taylor Catfish House") a winner for 1997 for its catfish. According to this web page, the restaurant is mentioned in Sanctuary, though I'm not so sure. (Certainly the town is mentioned, but the restaurant?)

With this issue of Faulkner News I am initiating a periodic column about all things Faulknerian. The purposes of such a personal column are many, but primarily I hope to explain a few things about Faulkner, and this web site, that do not fit very well elsewhere within this web site.

First, I'd like to report the addition of links to individual book titles that can be bought online at Amazon.com. A letter from the CEO of Amazon.com describing this web site's association with Amazon.com is available here. I've received a number of Email requests in the past months asking either where to find Faulkner texts online or where they might be purchased (particularly from those outside the United States). By including these bookstore links, I hope to make Faulkner’s texts more readily available to those who seek them, and though the texts are not available for free online, this is as close a solution as I can find. Except for a few excerpts and other isolated instances, Faulkner’s texts are not available to the general public online, as they are still under copyright protection. Within William Faulkner on the Web, links to books by and about Faulkner that are available for purchase at Amazon.com are currently located on each novel's "commentary" page. You may use the following pull-down menu to go directly to a given title. Other titles available online (such as the recent books about Faulkner listed above) will be added over time.

I've been working to update many parts of the web site and to improve the overall look and navigability of many individual pages. In some instances, I have added new pages (such as genealogical charts for the Bundren, Sartoris and Snopes families and new "Faulkner Criticism in the 1990s" bibliography pages for 1997 and 1998). However, I have discontinued making updates to the "What's New" page, as the information that page provides does not, in my view, justify the amount of time it takes to maintain it. For now, I will leave the "What's New" page in place as a kind of record of past achievement, but from now on, I will report substantial changes and new pages within this web site in this column.

In addition to the new pages already mentioned, the most recent additions to this web site include a new quiz on "Who said that?," character lists for several more Faulkner novels, updated bibliographies, and a number of resources and bibliographies for Faulkner’s short stories. I have also changed how information about Faulkner’s short story collections is presented; each collection now has a single page devoted to it.

There is still not a unique Faulkner biographical sketch here within this site, though I wrote an extensive article on the subject for another project I am working on: The Mississippi Writers Page, for the Department of English at the University of Mississippi. My work for the Mississippi Writers Page is closely related to my work here — in fact, the MWP stems in part from the success of William Faulkner on the Web — but with one key difference: my work here is my own, while the Mississippi Writers Page is under copyright by the University of Mississippi. (One additional difference is that I am paid for my work on the MWP.)

Finally, I want to clarify my position on student Email inquiries. I receive a large number of Email messages from students asking for help of various kinds, ranging from specific issues within Faulkner studies to more broad-based queries about topic development. Because of the number of messages I receive, I cannot respond to all; but in many, maybe even most instances, I do not respond because the requests are for information that students should rightly be expected to determine or conclude on their own. Please understand that, while I hope this web site will assist students in their understanding and appreciation of Faulkner, it is not intended as the answer to all things Faulknerian. One of the innate pleasures of Faulkner is struggling with the text, working through any frustration or incomprehensibility or confusion to come to some, any understanding, or at least less incomprehension. One of the sad facts of having read so much of Faulkner is that one can never go back and experience the text for the first time. I will not knowingly rob students of that experience.

This page was last modified on Monday, October 09, 2000 at 11:55 AM -0500