^{Note 1 in page 447} “William Faulkner,” Life Magazine, 28 September and S October 1953.

^{Note 3 in page 447} William Faulkner, A Critical Study (New York, 1951).

^{Note 3 in page 447} The World of William Faulkner (Durham : Duke Univ. Press, 1952).

^{Note 4 in page 447} The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1954).

^{Note 5 in page 447} In the exegetical and interpretative portions of his book Mr. Howe has made a valuable contribution to Faulknerian scholarship, but he has not always been sufficiently critical in his acceptance of biographical and factual data. Concerning the railroad which Colonel Falkner took a leading part in building, Mr. Howe says, “With his son John, who would later become an Assistant U. S. District Attorney, the Colonel built a railroad from Oxford to Memphis, and named the stations after characters in Sir Walter Scott's romances.” There is not now and never has been a railroad from Oxford to Memphis, the only feasible rail connection between the two points being via Holly Springs, and the line the Colonel did build has no station on it named after a Sir Walter Scott character. There is one station, Ingomar, named for a character in the Colonel's own romance, The White Rose of Memphis, another, Ecru, named for the color of the paint used on the station house, and a third, Falkner, named for the Colonel himself, but these are the only evidences of eccentric nomenclature, if they can be so called, that I have observed on the line. Malcolm Cowley well says in his Introduction to The Portable Faulkner (New York, 1946), “Most of the biographical sketches that deal with him are full of preposterous errors.” For information concerning Faulkner and his ancestry the reader will do well to rely on O'Connor's book, with a few inconsiderable exceptions later to be noted, and on Mr. Coughlan's two-part article in Life Magazine.

^{Note 6 in page 448} As quoted by Coughlan in Life for 28 September 1953, p. 118.

^{Note 7 in page 448} Ward L. Miner (p. 105) noted this circumstance but brushed it aside with too facile an explanation and proceeded with his attempt to identify Oxford and Jefferson. “By omitting the school,” says Mr. Miner, “Faulkner makes Jefferson a more nearly typical community of northern Mississippi.” Just so, but at the same time he shows that he is not thinking of Oxford, which in the minds of all Mississippians is identical with the University of Mississippi.

^{Note 8 in page 448} (New York, 1929), p. 179.

^{Note 9 in page 448} (New York, 1929), p. 290.

^{Note 10 in page 448} (New York, 1940), p. 124.

^{Note 11 in page 448} (New York, 1959), p. 141.

^{Note 12 in page 449} Mr. O'Connor (p. 5) says of Colonel Falkner, “He was at Harpers Ferry, took a significant part in the first battle of Manassas, and fought in several hard engagements,” apparently under the impression that a battle was fought at Harpers Ferry. Such was not the case. The post was regarded as practically undefendable and was readily surrendered by either side whenever the enemy invested it with a sufficient number of troops or weight of artillery. On 18 April 1861, the day after Virginia seceded, the national troops surrendered it without striking a blow. Colonel Thomas J. Jackson, soon to be called Stonewall, took command on 27 April 1861, but was superceded by Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston on 23 May 1861. At this time the post was serving as a mobilization point for the Confederate forces west of the mountains (see John D. Imbo-den's article in Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, I, 124), and that is why Colonel Falkner took his regiment there, for the purpose of being sworn into the Confederate service. On the approach of a strong federal force under General Robert Patterson and Colonel Lew Wallace, Johnston evacuated the place on 15 June 1861, and took up a position at Winchester, from whence on 20 July 1861, he passed over the mountains and joined Beauregard for the First Battle of Manassas. Colonel Falkner's regiment was a part of Johnston's command.

^{Note 13 in page 449} There is a good photograph of the monument in Life for 28 September 1953.

^{Note 14 in page 449} A reference to Colonel Falkner's European tour in the summer of 1883, which he described in Rapid Ramblings in Europe (Philadelphia, 1884). There is an autographed copy of this book, which contains an excellent photograph of the Colonel as a frontispiece, in the library of the Mississippi State College for Women.

^{Note 15 in page 449} This is the kind of inscription Faulkner no doubt thought his ancestor deserved, but the members of the family who erected the monument were of another opinion. Nothing appears on the tomb except the simple statement “Colonel William Falkner Born July 6, 1825 Died November 6, 1889.”

^{Note 16 in page 449} Quoted by permission of the copyright owner, Random House, Inc. This was probably suggested to Faulkner by an inscription on the tomb of Robert Hindman in the same cemetery : “Killed at Ripley Miss, by Wm. C. Falkner May 8, 1849.”

^{Note 17 in page 450} I am sure that members of the family have continued to visit the town. I met the novelist, his mother, and his brother John at Ripley on 23 April 1934. William had flown a plane there and had landed in a pasture adjacent to Highway IS on the southeastern outskirts of the town.

^{Note 18 in page 450} Frenchman's Bend did not appear in the early novels, but its origin was probably nothing more than Tippah Bottom, a fertile stretch of land along both sides of Tippah Creek in the western part of Tippah and the eastern part of Benton Counties, some eight or ten miles from Ripley. The hills in which Verginius MacCallum and his sons pursued their Arcadian existence were no doubt the Hatchie Hills, east of Ripley, where in earlier times there dwelt a class of people of so highly an individual way of life that they sometimes verged over into criminality. I do not mean anything so venial as illegal distilleries. These hills were once the haunts of the famous Eaton outlaws.

^{Note 19 in page 450} Upon hearing the vital statistics of this famous line, even Faulkner enthusiasts may be prone to exclaim: “Did ever so many write so much about so little!” The original line as begun in 1869 and completed in 1872 extended from Ripley, Mississippi, to Middleton, Tennessee, a distance according to the highway map of only 22 miles. It was a narrow-gauge (three-foot) line built of 36 pound steel, that is, 36 pounds per linear yard. The average weight of the steel used on modern, standard-gauge tracks is 112 pounds. Even these light rails had not been purchased but were donated by the Memphis and Charleston, the line with which junction was made at Middleton. Fifteen years later, in 1887, construction was begun southward from Ripley, and in 1889 the track reached Pontotoc. This was the total length of the road as controlled by Colonel Falkner and his bond holders, 64 miles. In 190S it became standard gauge as a part of the Gulf, Mobile, and Northern, and in 1940 it became a part of the Gulf, Mobile, and Ohio system. Passenger service was discontinued in 1954, not in 193S. See “Tippah County” in the Mississippi Historical Records Survey, compiled as a WPA project and printed in June 1942, and an article called “The Railroad” in The Southern Sentinel, the weekly newspaper published in Ripley, for 27 December 1934.

^{Note 20 in page 451} The raid is commemorated in the name of one of the principal thoroughfares of Holly Springs, Van Dorn Avenue.

^{Note 21 in page 451} General William S. Rosencrans, the Federal Commander at Corinth, reported the Confederate loss as outnumbering the Federal at least four to one (Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, n, 756). Van Dorn was severely criticized for his conduct of the battle but was officially exonerated by a Court of Inquiry (Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, ii, 756, and Dictionary of American Biography, xix, 185).

^{Note 22 in page 451} Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant (New York, 1885), I, 362.

^{Note 23 in page 451} J. F. H. Claiborne, Mississippi as Province, Territory, and State (Jackson, Mississippi, 1886), i, 459.

^{Note 24 in page 451} The best account of this raid I have been able to find is the one written by Dr. J. G. Deupree, who himself took part in it. It is printed in the Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, iv (1901), 49–61. After the war Deupree entered educational work and at the time of writing the article was Professor of Pedagogy at the University of Mississippi.

^{Note 25 in page 452} Personal Memoirs, I, 360–361. As everyone knows, when the campaign was renewed in the spring of 1863 Grant took the river route to Vicksburg. The city and the beleaguered Confederate Army, with Pemberton still in command, capitulated to him on 4 July 1863. Soon after his famous raid, Earl Van Dorn was released from Pemberton's army and sent to operate as a cavalry commander in conjunction with Forrest, with whom he soon had a violent quarrel, in central Tennessee. At Spring Hill in that state on 7 May 1863, he was shot and killed by a physician in whose home he had taken quarters. See Dunbar Rowland, Encyclopedia of Mississippi History (Madison, Wis., 1907), ii, 849.

^{Note 26 in page 452} Still convinced that when Faulkner speaks of Jefferson he can be thinking only of Oxford, O'Connor says vaguely of that town (p. 13) : “In August 1864 Federal troops under General A. J. Smith burned all but one of the main business structures in the town. Naturally the echoes of such events are frequent in Faulkner's stories, perhaps the most conspicuously haunted character being Gail Hightower of Light in August, who lives with a vision of his grandfather's being shot from the saddle during a raid on Jefferson.” It was no unidentifiable, generalized sort of raid, no burning of Jefferson by Federal troops, that Faulkner had in mind in this novel but a very definite one indeed. He can have meant no other, for he himself specifies that the event referred to was “Van Dorn's cavalry raid to destroy Grant's stores in Jefferson.” Light in August (New York, 1932), p. 451.

^{Note 27 in page 452} The actual distance from Holly Springs is only forty miles, and the two points are connected by the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad.

^{Note 28 in page 452} Op. cit., p. 86.

^{Note 29 in page 452} In the interest of accuracy I should say that census returns first show figures for the White race and then figures for All Other Races combined. In this section of Mississippi, however, there are so few members of any non-white race except Negroes that they may safely be disregarded for statistical purposes.

^{Note 30 in page 453} At that time Marshall County had not been subdivided and included the area now occupied by Benton. For these figures and for other pertinent information I am indebted to Ruth Watkins's article, “Reconstruction in Marshall County,” Publications of the Mississippi Historical Society, XII (1912), 155–213.

^{Note 31 in page 453} Op cit., p. 199.

^{Note 32 in page 454} The probability is not lessened by the fact that the same western states, Missouri, Kansas, and California, have a part in the history of both the Gill and Burden families, and that one member of each, Mrs. Gill and Joanna's grandfather, Calvin Burden, lacks either a hand or an arm.

^{Note 33 in page 454} (New York, 1948), p. 50.