The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer's career that is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers and journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative, or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading and research.

The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response. Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary in terms of the kind of information desired—be it about a single work, a period in the author's life, or the author's entire career. The intent is to provide quick and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general readers.

When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases England, as the writers' careers were in progress.

From the very beginning of his career as a producer, Walt Disney turned to fairy tales, folklore, and children's literature as a source of inspiration and adaptation for his animated films. When he determined to produce a feature-length animated film in 1935, among the works he considered, before settling on the Grimm Brothers’ story “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” was Washington Irving's “Rip Van Winkle.” From the time of its publication in 1819, the story had inspired hundreds of dramatic versions, as well as operas, stage musicals, and ultimately films. At the time, however, the film rights were held by Paramount Studios, which refused to release them to Disney. Some fourteen years later, Irving would again come to mind, but this time the story would be “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820), probably his second most widely known and popular short story.

The adaptation would constitute one-half of a double-bill feature, the first half based on the British classic The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame. It was released on October 5, 1949, under the title The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, and despite an uneasy marriage of mood and subject matter, the critics welcomed the film as a return to the classic animation the Disney Studios had largely abandoned in the late 1940s for combined live-action and animation anthologies, such as The Three Cabelleros (1945) and Song of the South (1946). The two parts would have a longer life when released separately for television and theatrical showings and as videotape reissues.

Disney had learned by then the value of using well-known personalities to provide easily-identifiable voices for the characters and narrators in his films, especially singers like Nelson Eddy, Dinah Shore, Dennis Day, Francis Langford, the Andrews Sisters, and even Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers. Having selected the ultimate British accent of Basil Rathbone to narrate the adventures of Mr. Toad and the denizens of Toad Hall, he would naturally turn to a quintessentially American voice to narrate the second half of the film.

The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer's career that is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers and journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative, or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading and research.

The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response. Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary in terms of the kind of information desired - be it about a single work, a period in the author's life, or the author's entire career. The intent is to provide quick and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general readers.

When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases England, as the writer's careers were in progress.

The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer's career that is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as it was made public by reviewers in contemporary newspapers and journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative, or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading and research.

The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response. Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary in terms of the kind of information desired—be it about a single work, a period in the author's life, or the author's entire career. The intent is to provide quick and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general readers.

When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases the United Kingdom, as the writers' careers were in progress.

The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer's career that is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers and journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative, or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading and research.

The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response. Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary in terms of the kind of information desired – be it about a single work, a period in the author's life, or the author's entire career. The intent is to provide quick and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general readers.

When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases England, as the writers' careers were in progress.

The American Critical Archives series documents a part of a writer's career that is usually difficult to examine, that is, the immediate response to each work as it was made public on the part of reviewers in contemporary newspapers and journals. Although it would not be feasible to reprint every review, each volume in the series reprints a selection of reviews designed to provide the reader with a proportionate sense of the critical response, whether it was positive, negative, or mixed. Checklists of other known reviews are also included to complete the documentary record and allow access for those who wish to do further reading and research.

The editor of each volume has provided an introduction that surveys the career of the author in the context of the contemporary critical response. Ideally, the introduction will inform the reader in brief of what is to be learned by a reading of the full volume. The reader then can go as deeply as necessary in terms of the kind of information desired-be it about a single work, a period in the author's life, or the author's entire career. The intent is to provide quick and easy access to the material for students, scholars, librarians, and general readers.

When completed, the American Critical Archives should constitute a comprehensive history of critical practice in America, and in some cases Great Britain, as the writers’ careers were in progress. The volumes open a window on the patterns and forces that have shaped the history of American writing and the reputations of the writers. These are primary documents in the literary and cultural life of the nation.

Anthony West. “Requiem for a Dramatist.” New Yorker, September 22, 1951, pp. 109–12.

Mr. Faulkner's new offering, Requiem for a Nun, is in the main a sequel to Sanctuary, and is concerned with the further misadventures of Temple Drake, a tomboy whose qualities have always had an unsettling effect on her creator. Even for the heroine of a novel of violence in the heyday of the genre, she was experienceprone to an unusual degree: Between the time she slipped off the train at Taylor and the time she was to be seen yawning at the watery charms of the Luxembourg Gardens on a wet autumn day, a good deal had happened to her. She had been in an automobile wreck, she had been involved in two murders, she had been raped in a manner new to the novel, and raped old-style by proxy, she had been kidnapped and held prisoner in a Memphis brothel, and she had committed perjury that resulted in an innocent man's being burned to death by a mob. It may seem that fate, playing fair, could not have had more in store for a simple Southern girl. But it did.

We now learn that after a year in Europe, Temple went decked in virgin's white to the American Embassy in Paris and there married up with Gowan Stevens, the well-bred lush whose bout of drinking landed her in her mess of trouble. She added to that slightly incredible step the wholly incredible one of returning to Jefferson, her home town and the county seat, to settle down.

Carvel Collins. “As Faulkner Saw New Orleans.” New York Times Book Review, February 7, 1954, p. 4.

In 1925 the Sunday Magazine section of The New Orleans Times-Picayune printed a series of sketches by William Faulkner. This was his first extended prose publication, his earlier published work having been chiefly poetry. The staff of the journal of Faulkner Studies, after searching through the Picayune files and finding eleven sketches, has reprinted them here in a limited edition.

At the end of 1924, when he was 27, Faulkner went to live in New Orleans and stayed there until he sailed for Europe the next June. These months were important in his development. For the first time he was in association with writers and artists and their shop talk; partly under their influence he put poetry somewhat to the side and began to concentrate on fiction. Among his associates in New Orleans were Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford, and the artist William Spratling, with whom Faulkner prepared a picture book about these men and others of their group.

Faulkner wrote the pot-boiling sketches for The Picayune under the general heading “Mirrors of Chartres Street.” A famous book of that time was Begbie's Mirrors of Downing Street, with its accounts of such personages as Lloyd George, Winston Churchill and Lord Kitchener. Faulkner's series set out to describe vagabonds, aspiring hoodlums, racing touts and workmen whom he saw in New Orleans' French Quarter, of which Chartres Street is a major thoroughfare.

William Van O'Connor points out in his helpful introduction that at the back of Faulkner's observation of this hard-pressed street life was “a desire to see the world as high romance.”

Charles Poore. “Books of the Times.” New York Times, April 1, 1954, p. 29.

Who reads Faulkner, the Nobel laureate of Yoknapatawpha County? Is he, as we have occasionally been told, a terrifically difficult writer whose stories are veiled in unutterable lore? Well, that's the legend. And legends die hard.

The truth, however, seems to be spectacularly otherwise. It shows, in fact, that he is hardly least among the popular writers of America. A survey made for this morning's column reveals that his publishers have sold more than 600,000 copies of his books in the Random House and Modern Library editions. And the New American Library reports that the total sales of nine Faulkner titles in paperback editions are nearing 5,000,000 copies. A roundish sum. Furthermore, the fact that three of the stories in his new anthology, The Faulkner Reader, appeared first in The Saturday Evening Post in 1932, 1942, and 1943, calls for a certain amount of revision in the cultists' theory of his abounding obscurity.

Would it not be fair to say, then, that–among book readers–those who find this distinguished Mississippi hunter, fisherman, farmer, and author hard to understand are in the minority? Those who think he is hard to read underestimate the intelligence of Americans. Anyone who can follow the punctuationless cadence of a telephone conversation can follow Faulkner. As Eudora Welty has pointed out: “His stories seem to race with time, race with the world”–and “the reason Faulkner's unwieldy looking sentences can race is of course their high organization, a musical organization.”

Also, I think he likes to leave out periods to bedevil the critics. The thing to do is to plunge into the stream of Faulkner's writing and enjoy it, along with several million other Americans.

James T. Farrell. “The Faulkner Mixture.” New York Sun, October 7, 1932, p. 29.

William Faulkner's most apparent literary virtues are an impressive stylistic competence and a considerable virtuosity in construction and organization. It is his sheer ability to write powerfully that carries many readers through the consistently melodramatic and sensational parts that occur regularly in his writings.

For instance, when one strives to reconstruct or to tell a Faulkner plot in retrospect one sees this melodrama clearly, but when one is reading, one is swept along by the man's driving pen. Technically, he is the master of almost all American writers who fit under such a loose and general category as “realists.” He has probably forgotten more about literary tricks than such writers as Ernest Hemingway or Sherwood Anderson will ever learn.

I have recently suggested, in these pages, a comparison between Faulkner and Julian Green. Another comparison, and perhaps a more apt one, is with the Irish novelist Liam O'Flaherty. In both cases, one finds an efflorescence of literary talents that is primarily employed in themes of violence. Of the two Faulkner is the more inclined toward out and out pathological cases, and also, his conceptions of character are the more unflinching. Both use melodrama literally. O'Flaherty is the more verbally excessive, and very often his melodrama consists in more metaphorical exaggerations. Thus, one of his hunted characters will skulk about nighttime Dublin, looking into store windows to see his face as the reflection of a ghoulish blob of flesh. With Faulkner, melodrama runs more to incident, to his sensational rapes, lynchings, and descriptions of the human being in sadistic and brutal moments.