In 1932, the Modern Library published Sanctuary with an introduction by William Faulkner in which he described the story as ‘a cheap idea … deliberately conceived to make money’. Thirty years later, the introduction was dropped, and no new introduction was commissioned. There are very few instances of introductions commissioned from the author, which were later removed from the series. Why did Modern Library editors decide to drop the introduction to Sanctuary, three decades after its publication? This decision seems all the more surprising that Sanctuary was available, without introduction, in a cheap paperback edition published by the New American Library. So why did the Modern Library relinquish its competitive advantage over the NAL edition of Sanctuary?

Faulkner's introduction has been so influential that nearly every scholarly article on Sanctuary has discussed whether or not the novel was a ‘cheap idea’. But no one has yet looked at the links between the foreword and the series in which it first appeared. My central argument is that the introduction became controversial only in the late 1930s, when critics started dividing ‘high’ culture from ‘lesser’ works. This chapter shows that the Modern Library initially used the introduction to present Sanctuary as a modern classic that was also sensational and exciting. When Faulkner joined the Random House list in 1936, a similar marketing strategy was applied to works that we now consider canonical (including Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses).