Sara Jaffe: From James Baldwin to Lynne Tillman—four influences on Dryland

Dryland by Sara Jaffe
(Tin House Books, 2015)

Our series of guest posts by writers of fiction, poetry, essays, and history continues today with a contribution from Sara Jaffe, whose just-published debut novel Dryland is a coming-of-age story set in Portland, Oregon, in the early 1990s. The novel is drawing praise from a number of other writers: novelist Justin Torres (We the Animals) has cited Jaffe as “an important new voice” and Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front) called the book “a gorgeous, layered, meticulous, clamoring, beating heart of a thing.”

Below, Jaffe discusses four authors who have influenced both her writing in general and Dryland in particular.

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room. When I was living in San Francisco, I had a sudden desire to re-read Giovanni’s Room and discovered I no longer had a copy. I ran out to the used bookstore and bought one. Upon arriving home and opening the book, I discovered an inscription: from S., my first real girlfriend, with whom I’d had a very prolonged and dramatic breakup, to the girl she dated after me. It was too perfect. Giovanni’s Room is a novel of love and doom in equal measure. And though the ultimate doom of Giovanni’s death may bookend the novel, the few scenes in the middle that describe the night David and Giovanni meet and first start to fall for each other are like gay love candy—so vivid, heady, and sweet.

Part of the reason it works so well is that, though the story is told through David’s first-person point-of-view, he’s in such deep denial about his attraction to Giovanni that it takes the older queens calling him out for us to fully get the sense of what’s going on. We get both the subjective thrill of David’s unnamed excitement and the vicarious thrill of Jacques and the others watching and naming it. It’s such a deft and interesting use of the first person, because it doesn’t put the onus on the reader to identify with David; rather, it allows us to observe him.

As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner
(Cape & Smith, 1930)

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. “I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” I still have my copy of As I Lay Dying from college, with that sentence, at the end of one of Dewey Dell’s sections, underlined. I think it was one of the first times I underlined a sentence in a novel not for what it had to do, in whatever convoluted and out-of-context manner, with me, but because I was so moved by the language itself. Every syllable pulses, and the image is indelible. As I Lay Dying did something to my ear, forever changed it. The novel marks when I began to seek tension-action-drama in the relationship of words to each other in a sentence, rather than (solely) at the level of narrative.

Jane Bowles, My Sister’s Hand in Mine: The Collected Works of Jane Bowles. I find it very difficult to describe the particular strangeness of a Jane Bowles story. Each character is so tightly contained in his or her own universe, utterly incapable of—or uninterested in—understanding why any other person says or does anything. A friend once described Bowles’s characters as having no interiority, but I don’t think that’s exactly it—it’s as if their interiors are turned outward, as if they lead with interiority, their speech and actions hindered by neither societal conventions, self-consciousness, nor self-awareness. In such a landscape, there’s no such thing as contradiction. And causality itself becomes completely upended, doing miraculous things to plot. What “happens” is dictated only by each character’s peculiar, particular logic. Bowles’s writing is soaked in an anxiety I recognize.

I don’t know if or how Jane Bowles actually shows up in my writing. I don’t discard psychological realism. But, in writing Dryland, when I was up against a passage that I had trouble wresting from cliche, I opened up a document called “Mrs. Copperfield” and tried to write it in a Bowlesian style. It helped me locate productive disconnections between characters, and to make characters’ actions and emotions unfamiliar to themselves.

Haunted Houses
by Lynne Tillman
(Poseidon Press, 1987)

Lynne Tillman, Haunted Houses. In the conventional bildungsroman, the protagonist is set on a path of self-discovery, and once he or she discovers what needs to be discovered, he or she changes, or comes right up to the cusp of change. But in Haunted Houses, Tillman’s first novel, the three protagonists—Grace, Emily, and Jane, who exist in parallel chapters but never meet—do not change, not really. Or, maybe more accurately, Tillman doesn’t foreground a narrative of change, or development, in any conventional sense. Her characters accrue experiences, they move through their lives, they think and act but when you remove the imperative of change each thought and action achieves a kind of parity with each other. In the resulting flatness, we feel the grain of lived experience—what it is to be a person in a body in the world.

Sara Jaffe’s fiction has appeared in such publications as Fence and BOMB and she co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians based on her experience as guitarist (1999–2004) for the post-punk band Erase Errata. Jaffe currently lives and teaches in Portland.

Previous “Influences” posts:
Jabari Asim • Deborah Baker • Kate Christensen • Jennifer Gilmore
Lauren Groff • Lev Grossman • Alan Heathcock • Jane Hirschfield
Alexandra Kleeman • Amitava Kumar • Adam Levin • Annie Liontas
Dawn McGuire • Dinaw Mengestu • Jim Moore • Manuel Muñoz
Maggie Nelson • Viet Thanh Nguyen • Geoffrey O’Brien • Arthur Phillips
Carl Phillips • Karen Russell • Timothy Schaffert • Philip Schultz
Mark Statman • Emma Straub • J. Courtney Sullivan • Ellen Ullman
Adam Wilson

Remembering Faulkner scholar Noel Polk (1943–2012)

On August 21, Noel Polk, professor, literary scholar, critic, and poet, died at his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Emeritus Professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly, Polk was best known for his editorial and critical work on William Faulkner and his critical work on Eudora Welty. The five volumes of Faulkner’s novels he co-edited with Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner for The Library of America involved painstaking research to reconstruct the most authoritative text for each novel, a process he described in the Notes on the Texts for each volume:

The Polk texts attempt to reproduce Faulkner's typescripts as he presented them to his publishers before editorial intervention. They accept only those revisions on typescript or proof that Faulkner seems to have initiated himself as a response to his own text, not those he made in response to a revision or a correction suggested by an editor; this is a very conservative policy which rejects many of Faulkner's proof revisions in favor of his original typescript.

Reconstructing Faulkner’s novels as he originally intended posed numerous problems for Polk as he recounted in his introduction to his collection of essays, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner:

[Faulkner] took almost no interest in the printed forms of his books: he occasionally fought losing battles with editors over their alterations, but he never restored his original intentions back to what had been editorially altered. And he never revised a novel after it was published; for all we know, he never even re-read his novels (except, of course, those passages he read in public). For all intents and purposes, when he gave a typescript to his publishers he lost interest in it and proceeded immediately to the next blank page; what proofing he did he did with some obeisance to his professional duty, but he took no pleasure or interest in these more mechanical stages of literary production.

Polk’s opens his essay “Where the Comma Goes: Editing William Faulkner,” with an eloquent brief for the role of the scholarly editor:

Scholarly editing is the ultimate act of criticism, because it involves a wider range of issues than interpretation alone does, from macrocosmic ones like the author’s meaning, to more mundane and microcosmic ones like where does the comma go? Dealing with all these issues responsibly requires extensive knowledge of publishing history and of publishing techniques and procedures, of standard usage in the author’s period, of the author’s preferences at any period of his or her career, of the author’s relationship to commercial editors, to financial considerations, and to the political and cultural times, and of the author’s practices in composing, revising, and proofreading. The editor must be sensitive to an author’s most subtle nuances of style, punctuation, and spelling, as well as to larger issues in the work, but also constantly aware of the complex interaction between his or her own aesthetic sense and the author’s, because in order to determine where the comma goes the editor must constantly differentiate between authorial error and authorial intention. Finally, the editorial act is central to the critical enterprise because editorial decisions impinge directly upon questions of canon and literary history.

Polk’s essays detail the seriousness and care with which he tackled his research—“untold hours trying to parse out fine Faulknerian distinctions between ‘diningroom,’ ‘dining room,’ and ‘dining-room.’ It’s not all fun.”—but they also include transporting passages about his delight in discovery:

Few things in my scholarly life have given me the kind of personal pleasure that I got from showing the manuscripts of The Sound and the Fury to a friend late one cluttered Friday afternoon at the Alderman Library. You who have held it know that it is, simply, gorgeous. It and the manuscripts of Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, are almost objets d’arts, each individual page a canvas sensual to the fingers and pleasing to the eye: rule-straight lines of highly stylized handwriting forming a visual counterpoint to the scope and power, the psychological chaos, of the world the handwriting is creating. The pages thus speak eloquently of a shoring up against that chaos, of compression, of control.

Polk had long wished to realize Faulkner’s dream of publishing a version of The Sound and the Fury which used colored ink to represent the time shifts in the sometimes bewildering opening Benjy section. Last month the Folio Society published a limited edition of The Sound and the Fury that Polk co-edited with Stephen Ross that uses fourteen different inks to mark each time period.

Also of interest:

• William Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury: It’s good that he didn’t wait “until publishing grows up,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post 
• “Living Outside History,” an excerpt in The American Scholar from Noel Polk’s memoir of growing up in Picayune, Mississippi
• Friends and colleagues remember Noel Polk at The University of Southern Mississippi, where he taught for 27 years
• Walking Safari, or The Hippo Highway, Polk’s collection of poems, won the 2011 Texas Review Press Southern Poetry Breakthrough: Mississippi award

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels (5 books)

Rodney Welch on the many contradictory lessons in At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing

Which is more important in boxing: muscle or skill? Do the most successful fighters crave violence—or transcend it? In his incisive review for The Millions of At the Fights: American Writings on Boxing, Rodney Welch tears into the many opposing forces on display in the book’s fifty pieces—but he begins with a scene from Faulkner:

In William Faulkner’s masterpiece Absalom, Absalom!, landowner Thomas Sutpen’s idea of a rousing good time is to stage fights between his slaves. It’s his way of reminding himself of his own station in life, his triumph over his white trash past, to watch the lower orders go after each other tooth and nail, “fighting not like white men fight, with rules and weapons, but like negroes fight to hurt one another quick and bad.” Occasionally, he even likes to participate, “as a grand finale or perhaps as a matter of sheer deadly forethought toward the retention of supremacy, domination, he would enter the ring with one of the negroes himself.” 

Money, power, race, and violence – they’ve all been a part of boxing from the beginning and they’re on full display in At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing from The Library of America.

Welch then uncorks a barrage of combinations about good versus evil, muscle versus skill, white power, exploitation, money, and how boxing “turns writers into pugilists of prose”—and “makes them reach for odd literary references,” as in the following:

His fighting style is as formless as the prose of Gertrude Stein.
– Heywood Broun

So he perished there in that Homeric stewpan, a brave man but an unwise one.
– H. L. Mencken 

Since the rise of [Rocky] Marciano, [Archie] Moore, a cerebral and hyper-experienced and light-colored pugilist who has been active since 1936, has suffered the pangs of a supreme example of bel canto who sees himself crowded out of the opera house by a guy who can only shout.
– A. J. Liebling

Or as John Schulian, one of the book’s co-editors, described the sport in an interview with The Library of America (PDF): “Primitive. Savage. And yet beautiful and ennobling and capable of inspiring a kind of sweat-stained poetry.”

Also of interest:

• Forty years ago, the first Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier bout, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• A memorial to George Kimball (1943–2011), co-editor of At the Fights, a previous Reader’s Almanac post
• “Up the Stairs with Cus D’Amato” by Pete Hamill, a previous Story of the Week
• “Cobb Fights It Over Again” by Irvin S. Cobb on the Dempsey-Carpentier fight, a previous Story of the Week

Related LOA works: At the Fights: American Writers on Boxing; William Faulkner: Complete Novels

Timothy Schaffert on how Ambrose Bierce, Willa Cather, and William Faulkner have treated “our often tawdry funerary customs”

The Coffins of Little Hope
by Timothy Schaffert
(Unbridled Books, 2011)

Timothy Schaffert joins our continuing series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry. Much like Essie, the 83-year-old, widowed obituary writer who narrates his recently published fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope, Schaffert is a bit obsessed with what can be discovered when “chronicling the dead.” Here he revisits how three master storytellers use end of life tales to plumb the nature of love, grief, prejudice, and horror.

As a child, I once saw an undertaker close the coffin lid on its inhabitant, and I’ve spent years trying to describe that dip-in-the-road feeling I got in my gut at the sight of it. The organist had stopped her wheezy hymn, bringing a thudding silence to the church. As sudden as a buzzard the undertaker then swooped up to the altar to unprop the pillow of the deceased (my great-grandfather), and a shadow slowly consumed the casket’s bed, my great-grandfather’s suit, his gaunt, stoic, pioneer’s face, then, lastly, his lovely and stately bald head. In my memory, I seem to recall hearing every squeak of the hinges and rustling of lace. The undertaker did everything but lock the lid and throw away the key. I felt I’d witnessed at the front of the church a bit of business that should’ve taken place at the back of the church, and such errors of decorum tend to echo across the years.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to realize that some of my favorite short stories are those that have done exactly what that undertaker did—stories that offer unsettling insight into our often tawdry funerary customs.

William Faulkner’s last surviving relative, Dean Faulkner Wells, shares her memories

Earlier this month Dean Faulkner Wells, the last living relative with firsthand memories of William Faulkner, published her deliciously anecdote-filled memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi. Wells is the daughter of Dean, the youngest of the four Faulkner brothers.

The dramatic event that governed her life occurred before she was even born:

The best and worst thing that could have happened to me took place on November 10, 1935, four months before I was born, when my father, a barnstorming pilot, was killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-eight. The best, because it placed me at the center of the Faulkner family; the worst, because I would never know my father.

The oldest of the brothers, William felt tremendous guilt and responsibility for Dean’s death. A pilot himself, he had encouraged his brother to fly, paid for his lessons, and gave him his own plane, a Waco C cabin cruiser. As his niece writes, “It was as if William made a vow to Dean that November afternoon when he saw his unrecognizable body in the wreckage of the plane: He would tend to me in Dean’s place.” She grew up calling her uncle “Pappy” and Faulkner became her legal guardian and paid for her education and her wedding.

For the epitaph on Dean’s grave marker Faulkner chose the one he wrote in 1929 for John Sartoris, the ill-fated flyer in Flags in the Dust:

I bare him on eagles’
wings and brought him
unto me.

For Dean Faulkner Wells–and for Faulkner’s mother–John Sartoris was clearly based on Dean Faulkner, and the lines in the novel that introduce the epitaph recall Dean’s spontaneous, generous character:

Yet withal there was something else, as though the merry wild spirit of him who had laughed away so much of his heritage of humorless and fustian vainglory, managed somehow even yet . . . to soften the arrogant gesture with which they bade him farewell.

The Faulkner who Wells reveals is less the literary lion and more the devoted brother and doting uncle, as her description of the period following her father’s death demonstrates:

After Dean’s burial, William moved into Maud’s house at 510 South Lamar to care for his mother and his brother’s wife [Louise]. He slept on a folding cot in the dining room, with his Underwood portable on the table next to the galley proofs of Absalom, Absalom!

Each night he drew Louise’s bath, and before she went to bed he would bring her a glass of warm milk and a sleeping pill. One morning, as William and Louise sat the table waiting for breakfast to be served, Louise said, “I can’t eat. I dreamed the whole accident last night.” William answered, “I dream it every night.”

Only once did Faulkner share his feelings about his brother with his niece: “Your father was a rainbow,” he said.

Also of interest:

• Read an article about or listen to the interview with Dean Faulkner Wells at Southern Living
• Read Wendy Smith’s review of the book in The Los Angeles Times
• Read an excerpt from Every Day by the Sun

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels

William Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury: It’s good that he didn’t wait “until publishing grows up”

Although William Faulkner was born toward the end of the nineteenth century (on September 25, 1897), the history of the publication of his most famous work, The Sound and the Fury, suggests he might have been right at home with the displays on the iPad, Kindle, and Nook.

His editor for The Sound and the Fury was Ben Wasson, a friend of Faulkner’s from the University of Mississippi. Wasson had migrated to New York to become a writer but his life changed when he started helping out his old friend. Even though he had never been a literary agent, Wasson succeeded in placing Flags in the Dust by “Bill” Faulkner with editor Harrison Smith at Harcourt. And, even though he had never edited a manuscript before, when Harcourt asked Wasson to cut Flags by twenty-five percent in two weeks, he did. He reports Faulkner’s reaction in his memoir, Count No ‘Count: Flashbacks to Faulkner: “You’ve done a good job. It ought to suit them.” Harcourt published the edited version as Sartoris in 1928.

When Harrison Smith left Harcourt to form Cape & Smith in December 1928, he hired Wasson. One of Wasson’s earliest acquisitions as a first-time editor was The Sound and the Fury. Months before, he had been the first person to read the manuscript. As he tells it in his memoir, Wasson turned in the edited version of Flags and the next morning Faulkner came to his room and dropped a large envelope on the bed: “Read this one, Bud. It’s a real son of a bitch.... This one’s the greatest I’ll ever write.” The next morning their enthusiastic discussion turned to the Benjy chapter. Wasson said he found it hard to follow. Faulkner agreed it was “demanding” but:

If I could only get it printed the way it ought to be with different color types for the different times in Benjy’s section recording the flow of events for him, it would make it simpler, probably. I don’t reckon, though, it’ll ever be printed that way, and this’ll have to be the best, with the italics indicating the changes of events.

The readability of the Benjy section kept bothering Wasson. In editing the novel he decided without consulting Faulkner to change all the italics to roman type and indicate time changes by line spaces. Faulkner first learned of this when he received the galley proofs. This prompted a long and scathing rebuke from Mississippi, of which the following is an excerpt:

I think italics are necessary to establish for the reader Benjy’s confusion; that unbroken-surfaced confusion of an idiot which is outwardly a dynamic and logical coherence.... I wish publishing was advanced to use colored ink for such.... But the form in which you now have it is pretty tough. It presents a most dull and poorly articulated picture to my eye. If something must be done, it were better to rewrite this whole section objectively, like the 4th section. I think it is rotten, as is. But if you won’t have it so, I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up to it. Anyway, change all the italics.... And don’t make any more additions to the script, bud. I know you mean well, but so do I.

The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929, with surprisingly few typographical errors. In the early thirties the Grabhorn Press proposed a new edition with the Benjy section in three different colors to indicate time shifts. Newsweek writer Malcolm Jones, who also wondered recently what Faulkner might have done with e-books, noted that the author even prepared a copy for this edition, but the publisher “deemed the idea too expensive, and somehow Faulkner’s marked-up copy was lost, making it one of the missing grails of antiquarian book collectors.”

Read more at the official William Faulkner website.

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels

Presidents and the classics

The recent spate of articles over President Obama’s summer reading prompts an inquiry into how well acquainted our presidents have been with classic American literature.

In 2009 the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York organized a display of books Barack Obama read in his twenties. The Curious Autodidact offers the complete list of 54 books, in which we find three books by Philip Roth, two each by James Baldwin and Herman Melville, and works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, and Richard Wright, plus The Collected Writings of Thomas Jefferson and The Federalist Papers.

A recent post at Robin Bates's blog, On Better Living Through Beowulf, plumbs this list for meaning, wondering “what Obama would see in the ‘I’d prefer not to’ Bartleby” but thinking that in Benito Cereno he might see slaves “doing a complicated dance to present an acceptable face to the outside world.” Bates wonders, “Is Obama more a Jeffersonian or a Hamiltonian, a populist or a federalist? I see strains of both in his thinking.” And, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Jon Meacham apparently received the same list of Obama’s favorites via email. Meacham discerned the same “tragic sensibility” in both Obama and Republican presidential candidate John McCain because each listed For Whom the Bell Tolls among their favorite books: “They embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes.”

The most extensive citation of former president George W. Bush’s reading tastes appeared in Karl Rove’s famous column in The Wall Street Journal, “Bush Is a Book Lover,” in which Rove recounted the annual reading competition he had with the president. His much touted reading of Albert Camus’s The Stranger aside, Bush favored biographies and histories:

His reading [in 2008] included a heavy dose of history—including David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter, Rick Atkinson's Day of Battle, Hugh Thomas's Spanish Civil War, Stephen W. Sears's Gettysburg and David King's Vienna 1814. There's also plenty of biography—including U. S. Grant's Personal Memoirs; Jon Meacham's American Lion; James M. McPherson's Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Jacobo Timerman's Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.

The Clinton Library has posted a list of some of former president William Clinton’s 21 favorite books. In addition to histories and biographies, there are several American classics: The Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron. It seems odd to find William Faulkner missing from this list since Gabriel Garcia Marquez posted a memorable account of a dinner he and Carlos Fuentes had with Clinton in 1995. When the conversation turned to favorite books:

Clinton said his was the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and Carlos Fuentes stuck loyally to Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's stellar novel, no question, although others would choose Light in August for purely personal reasons. Clinton, in homage to Faulkner, got to his feet and, pacing around the table, recited from memory Benji's monologue, the most thrilling passage, and perhaps the most hermetic, from The Sound and the Fury.

Jennifer Schuessler recently asked, “Are You Reading What He’s Reading?” in The New York Times. Her assessment of President Obama’s reading tastes led her back to Theodore Roosevelt, who, if not our best-read president, was certainly the only one to confess that “now and then one’s soul thirsts for laughter,” as he does in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open:

Now and then one’s soul thirsts for laughter.... Mark Twain at his best stands a little apart, almost as much so as Joel Chandler Harris. Oliver Wendell Holmes, of course, is the laughing philosopher, the humorist at his highest, even if we use the word “humor” only in its most modern and narrow sense.... If any man feels too gloomy about the degeneracy of our people from the standards of their forefathers, let him read Martin Chuzzlewit; it will be consoling.

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels; Ulysses S. Grant: Memoirs and Selected Letters

Listen to William Faulkner online

The University of Virginia recently posted audio recordings of William Faulkner reading and answering questions in 1957 and 1958 during his two terms as the university’s first Writer in Residence. The audio quality is quite good and Faulkner can be quite effusive in his answers, as the sample below from May 23, 1958, demonstrates. This exchange occurred on his last day there, following his reading of a passage from The Sound and the Fury.

Student: What is the immediate stimulus that makes you write?

Faulkner: Oh, it’s a demon. I don’t know where it came from. [audience laughter] I think every artist has got one.

Student: Do you think—what I'm trying[...] . [audience laughter] [...]. Do you—do you think before you write or do you write— [audience laughter]

Faulkner: Well, I'm glad you stopped there. Thank you. [audience laughter] Did—I think I know what you mean by the stimulus. It's—you're alive in the world. You see man. You have an insatiable curiosity about him, but more than that you have an admiration for him. He is frail and fragile, a web of flesh and bone and mostly water. He's flung willy nilly into a ramshackle universe stuck together with electricity. [audience laughter] The problems he faces are always a little bigger than he is, and yet, amazingly enough, he copes with them, not individually but—but as a race. He endures. He's outlasted dinosaurs. He's outlasted atom bombs. He'll outlast communism. Simply because there's some part in him that keeps him from ever knowing that he's whipped, I suppose. That as frail as he is, he—he lives up to his codes of behavior. He shows compassion when there's no reason why he should. He's braver than he should be. He's more honest. The writer is—is so interested, he sees this as so amazing and—and you might say so beautiful. Anyway, it—it's so moving to him that he wants to put it down on paper or in music or on canvas, that he simply wants to isolate one of these instances in which man—frail, foolish man—has acted miles above his head in some amusing or dramatic or tragic way. Anyway, some gallant way. That, I suppose, is the incentive to write, apart from it being fun. I sort of believe that is the reason that people are artists. It's—it's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do. You're never bored. You never reach satiation.

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels

James Avati, “King of the Paperbacks”

Tally Ho! recently posted images of several favorite paperback covers of William Faulkner novels from the ’50s.

Many of these covers were created by James Avati, the artist frequently credited as having invented the art of paperback covers. A 1998 MetroActive Arts interview with Avati captures how he worked:

. . . [Avati] stood out from the majority of other illustrators of the time by insisting on actually reading every book before designing its cover.

As a result, he read some very good books. Among Avati’s thousand-plus illustrations are those for Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, C. S. Forester’s The African Queen, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place, Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy.

Avati's approach—to capture the book’s overall theme, rather than a specific scene, by employing gritty, boldly realistic characters placed in a sharply detailed setting—immediately proved to have the desired effect: It sold books.

Related LOA works: William Faulkner: Complete Novels