[Faulkner's short fiction that was] not included in Collected Stories and Knight's Gambit—has survived only in the bound files of old magazines and in hard-to-find books: in obscure, out-of-the-way publications or in editions long out of print. Moreover, at the author's death in 1962, there were 13 essentially complete narratives left in manuscript, surviving but not conveniently available to students of Faulkner's career. With the Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, Joseph Blotner, who has already written the authorized biography and edited a selection of the letters, completes the Faulkner canon and brings us toward a remedy of the situation just described. Though the book has its obvious commercial characteristics, and is painful after the fashion of all gathered literary remains, it was a job that had to be done.
The first half of Uncollected Stories is made up of twenty narratives which first appeared independently and were subsequently incorporated into Faulkner novels. We know the tales which they recount as chapters of The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, The Mansion, and The Big Woods. The differences between the two versions of the narratives tell us a good deal about the aesthetic principles Faulkner followed in his revisions, and therefore about his craft: his attempts "to reduce the passion and beauty of being alive into something concrete that can be held in the hand."
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