Robert E. McClure. “Books Worth Reading.” Santa Monica Evening Outlook, January 20, 1939, p. 10.

If the first mark of writing genius is power of creative imagination, William Faulkner of the Deep South is unquestionably such a genius and in the top flight of contemporary writers. Unfortunately for his popularity, his imagination is of a peculiarly morbid and tortured kind, and he delights in teasing and mystifying his readers before shocking them out of their senses and stunning them with nightmare horrors. So he is not for the tender-minded or for those who ask to be pleasantly entertained. Yet not to know Faulkner is to miss some of the most exciting writing of our time.

Moreover he is one of the most indigenous of our writers, who can tell us a great deal about certain parts of America and certain types of people and experience, without having to go to Loyalist Spain for inspiration. And he has matured. In his latest book, The Wild Palms, he no longer shocks for the sake of shocking, no longer reminds us of an over-imaginative youth too long exposed to the reptilian terrors and malarial fevers of a southern swamp, without benefit of sunshine and fresh air. He has taken, in this new book, two story themes that are as old as the Greek dramatists, and has adapted them to the American scene in a manner all his own, with brilliant artistry and a power of imagery not likely to be surpassed by any living writer.

The two stories are opposed to each other like contrapuntal themes in a musical composition.