William Faulkner - Mirrors of Chartres Street First Edition Hardcover 1953 | Faulkner Studies Collection | Rare Book for Literature Enthusiasts & Collectors

Faulkner, William,  Minneapolis, Minnesota: Faulkner Studies, 1953. 

English, limited edition #491/1000, octavo, Very Good, 8 1/2" x 5 1/2", 93 pp

Very Good tan cloth hardcover, bumping to head and tail, cocked spine, some mild sunning to top edge, otherwise clean interior, tightly bound. Illustrated with black-and-white drawings by Mary Demopoulos, foreword by William Van O'Connor. Very Good dust jacket, edgewear and scuffing around flaps, no protected by paper-backed Mylar.

The first collection of Faulkner's short stories published in the New Orleans daily newspaper, Times Picayune. While O'Connor's somewhat disparaging opening describes these stories as crude "early" work, but they predate The Sound and the Fury by only four years, and traces of these real life stories find their way into Faulkner's fiction, e.g., the opening in "Hope" is a scene with a street musician playing a saw with a bow, a scene that echoes Luster trying to teach himself how to make the saw sing in the basement. In these stories are the first signs of Faulkner's gift for immersing himself in another person's consciousness, both his reflection of white institutional power and his representation of the individual consequences of that power. An overall handsome copy of an important but often overlooked collection of stories by one of America's most innovative authors.