SOURCE: Polk, Noel. “Man in the Middle: Faulkner and the Southern White Moderate.” In Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner, pp. 219-41. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.

In the following essay, Polk explores Faulkner's views on social issues—particularly race in the South—both in his fiction and his personal life.

Faulkner wrote Intruder in the Dust in the winter and early spring of 1948, seasons during which the Mississippi Democratic party geared itself for a vital confrontation with the national Democratic party at the summer convention in Philadelphia over the report of President Truman's Commission on Civil Rights. Truman was urging Congress “to adopt his civil rights program embodying voting rights, employment opportunities, and other provisions destined to draw fire from Southern Democrats” (Winter 141). Governor Fielding Wright called a meeting of Mississippi Democrats for February 12, Lincoln's birthday, in Jackson. All members of the legislature...