[William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country is at once] the most courteous, modest, sensible and helpful of existing guides. For a guide is most nearly what it is, a handbook for strangers….

In many ways … [this is] the book one might have expected from Brooks as Southerner and distinguished teacher but curiously not the book expected of Brooks as New Critic, author of The Well-Wrought Urn, the relentless verbal inquisitor. (p. 110)

Brooks has cast a broad loose net and landed, not the inert mass of symbols, parallels, archetypes which are the usual Faulknerian catch (which Brooks himself denounces as "symbol-mongering") but any number of separate attentions, insights and understandings. His method—if not infallible, surely the safest for dealing with an apparent genius—is to assume from the start that Faulkner knew what he meant, that the finished book is that meaning, that the form is the meaning, and...