Many informed Americans now consider William Faulkner to be the greatest American fiction writer of the 20th century and just possibly in our history. But his achievement of such recognition came to him with a painful slowness. He was 53 when he won the Nobel Prize, and in his acceptance speech he described his life's work as having been accomplished "in the agony and sweat of the human spirit…." Many of us now know enough about his life to realize that he did not exaggerate.

A distressing element was the circumstance that those novels written in the agony of the human spirit did not sell…. Faulkner frequently complained to his close friends and his literary agents that as a consequence he was forced to grind out short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and such like magazines to keep bread and meat on the table. His other expedient was to go to Hollywood and work as a scriptwriter….

[One] must welcome Joseph Blotner's edition of the hitherto uncollected stories [The Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner]. The intelligent reader will not, of course, expect it to be a florilegium culled from the Faulknerian garden. Uncollected Stories is not that sort of book. It amounts to no more than what its title claims: a collection of stories which, for one reason or another, were not printed in Knight's Gambit (1949) or in Collected Stories (1950). Some of the stories that appear were long ago incorporated, usually in altered form, into such novels as The Unvanquished or The Hamlet. (p. 51)

Still others, those that make up Section III of this book, have never before been printed anywhere. This last group includes stories like "Adolescence," written toward the beginning of Faulkner's career (composed in the early 1920s) and a number of stories from the late Twenties and early Thirties, which were turned down by all the magazine editors to whom Faulkner sent them. The editors can scarcely be blamed, for the stories do not come off.

Yet some of them, "The Big Shot," "Dull Tale," "A Return," and "Evangeline," will, for many readers, prove to be the most exciting stories in the present collection. They show the young Faulkner's head fairly seething with the characters, dramatic situations, and themes that would be brilliantly set forth in the masterpieces of the ensuing decades. Thus, one finds Popeye and Red, those denizens of the Memphis underworld, already about the nefarious businesses they would pursue in Sanctuary. We get a glimpse of Temple Drake, with her "bold, painted mouth," trying to look "cool, predatory, and discreet," as she plays at sex, though in "The Big Shot" she is called Wrennie Martin. One reads cynical observations about women's natural affinity for evil such as Mr. Compson will utter in The Sound and the Fury.

In "The Big Shot" and in "Dull Tale" (a revision of "The Big Shot") Faulkner reveals himself to be already fascinated with the story of a poor white boy's rise from poverty to wealth. Martin is a typical rags-to-riches hero. He has come to financial power through native shrewdness, patience, and relentless willpower. Out of this archetype of the Protestant work ethic Faulkner will later on separate out such specialized characters as Thomas Sutpen and Flem Snopes. On the one hand, Martin lacks the tragic nature of Sutpen and on the other, the cold-blooded meanness of Flem. (pp. 51-2)

The seeds of future novels are not only to be discovered in characters and isolated incidents. In "Evangeline" we find the very plot of Absalom, Absalom! We realize that here we are reading a first draft of Faulkner's greatest novel….

Yet how different the two versions are!… By comparing "Evangeline" with Absalom, Absalom! we witness the always marvelous metamorphosis of grub into butterfly. (p. 52)

In stressing the stories of Blotner's Section III I do not want to suggest that Uncollected Stories is primarily for professional scholars. Anyone with a decent acquaintance with four or five of the best novels will find much to interest him in this volume, for the book has clearly been designed for the reader of amateur status. It does not bristle with scholarly apparatus. (pp. 52-3)