Professor Cleanth Brooks of Yale has written a long, handsome, and unfailingly sensible book about all of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels [William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country]. He is obsessed by no thesis, driven by no design: he simply wants to help us to read the novels as sympathetically and thoroughly as he has, and as they deserve to be read. To those who would shrink the novels into histories of the South or tracts on the Negro Problem, or bloat them into symbol-lands, to those who would wrench out his characters' speeches and call them Faulkner's, to all of the many non-readers and misreaders and pushy, perverse interpreters he counters his own brand of humble and illuminating common sense. "The book has its own rights, as it were, and in proportion as we admire it, we shall want to see not merely what we can make of it, but...