Faulkner himself is to blame for the long critical disparagement of "Sanctuary," the fifth novel he wrote. "To me it is a cheap idea," he said in his introduction to the Modern Library edition (1932), "because it was deliberately conceived to make money…. I took a little time out, and speculated what a person in Mississippi would believe to be current trends, chose what I thought would be the right answer and invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks and sent it to [Harrison] Smith, who had done 'The Sound and the Fury' and who wrote me immediately, 'Good God, I can't publish this. We'd both be in jail.'"…
Being a "cheap idea" hastily executed to make money, "Sanctuary" could be brushed aside. Critics and readers didn't suspect that Faulkner mightn't be telling the complete truth about it, given his early passion for astounding the public…. It wasn't wholly invented, but was largely based on a story that Faulkner had heard from a woman in a New Orleans nightclub about her abduction by an impotent gangster. Faulkner was familiar with the various backgrounds to be presented, including the Memphis underworld (Memphis then being the murder capital of the United States). Moreover, he had on hand Horace Benbow, a character left over from "Sartoris" when that novel was shortened before publication; Horace might serve as his storyteller. With all this material, and with the help of his extraordinary imagination, he might somehow develop the cheap idea into a powerful novel.
