The address which William Faulkner delivered in Stockholm on 10 December 1950, upon being awarded the Nobel Prize, is a challenge to his fellow writers to recall that ‘the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself’ are the true subject of art. The artist who forgets this, Faulkner warned, ‘writes not of love but of lust’ if he does not dedicate himself to ‘the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths’, then his art is ‘ephemeral and doomed’; and the artist himself ‘labors under a curse’.