In the introduction to the 1932 Modern Library edition of Sanctuary (his sixth novel), William Faulkner took an unprecedented step for a writer of "serious" fiction. Lifting the veil around the pragmatic side of his career, he stated flatly that the novel was deliberately conceived to make money. He reported: "I had been writing books for about five years, which got published and not bought . . . [so] I began to think of books in terms of possible money. I decided I might as well make some of it myself . . . [I thus] invented the most horrific tale I could imagine and wrote it in about three weeks."The last part of Faulkner's admission is a ruse inasmuch as the novel took him at least four months to write. Similarly, it was not entirely a fictional invention since the central incident was derived from a newspaper account of a criminal...