Faulkner's County

488 pp., 6 x 9, 27 illus., 3 maps, notes, bibl., index

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8078-4931-6
Published: June 2001

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Awards & distinctions

A 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Lafayette County, Mississippi, was the primary inspiration for what is arguably the most famous place in American fiction: William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner once explained that in his Yoknapatawpha stories he "sublimated the actual into the apocryphal." This history of Lafayette County reverses that notion, using Faulkner's rich fictional portrait of a place and its people to illuminate the past.

From the arrival of Europeans in Chickasaw Indian territory in 1540 to Faulkner's death in 1962, Don Doyle chronicles more than four centuries of local history. He traces the building of a permanent community and plantation economy by white settlers, the lives of slaves in the region, the experiences of secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction, town life in Oxford, and the "Revolt of the Rednecks" Faulkner captured in his saga of the Snopes clan.

Drawing on both history and literature, Doyle renders a rich and deeply researched portrait of Faulkner's home. "Yoknapatawpha was a place of the imagination, invented by Faulkner as a vehicle for developing a coherent body of fiction," Doyle writes, "but the raw materials from which he created this place and its people lay right at his front porch."

About the Author

Don H. Doyle, McCausland Professor of History at the University of South Carolina, is author of New Men, New Cities, New South: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Mobile, 1860-1910.
For more information about Don H. Doyle, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"Remarkable. . . . A highly readable history of Lafayette County. . . . An important interpretation of one of the greatest American novelists and a major contribution to the history of the South."--Journal of Southern History

"Doyle has served up something . . . unusual and badly needed-- A first-rate community study set in the Deep South. . . . A superb history of southern society in microcosm. . . . An important, pathfinding work. . . . Those interested in the social history of the South, or of the United States generally, should not miss this book."--Journal of American History

"A significant contribution to Faulkner studies. . . . An engaging and informative historical narrative, a long overdue history of Faulkner's native county that will certainly prove an indispensable resource to Faulkner scholarship in the years to come."--Civil War Book Review

"Doyle's excellent study will be of interest to historians of Mississippi and the South, as well as [to] students of Faulkner."--History

"This is a splendid book about William Faulkner and his home of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Doyle draws deeply on history and literature to produce a highly readable and well-documented study of this county. . . . Highly recommended."--Choice

"[This book is] quite compelling, and it will surely be a resource for Faulkner scholars."--Mississippi Quarterly