Philip Y. Coleman. “Debt Repaid to Faulkner.” Daily Illini (Champaign, III), May 13, 1958.

The publishing of Three Famous Short Novels by William Faulkner is both an act of publishing inequity and a payment of retribution for previous inequity which well serves to point out what is wrong with the American publishing industry and why what's wrong cannot be corrected.

William Faulkner wrote for years, a novelist unnoticed, hardly known outside his home town–known there as a bum. His attempts to get recognition as a novelist met with dismal failure as book after book went unnoticed and unbought. He wrote ably–if not consistently, flashily. But it was not until he wrote Sanctuary, a novel he professes to have written only because he knew it would attract attention, that he had a publishing success.

Now things are different. William Faulkner is a Nobel Prize winner. All his works have made money, including the earlier failures. He is universally acclaimed.

So now the publishing people are repaying William Faulkner for all those hard years. They have not only published everything he has written, but they have used all the tricks available to republish the same works time after time.

Three Famous Short Novels is one of those tricks. It contains in order “Spotted Horses,” “Old Man,” and “The Bear.”

“Spotted Horses” is a seventy page excerpt from a full length novel, The Hamlet. It is funny and entertaining, much lighter than the usual Faulkner writing. But it is not a novel.

“The Bear” is a novel. It is built around a central character who goes through a profound change.