Hollywood, California (Location Key)

California figures as an "Out of Yoknapatawpha" location in over a dozen texts. Given the significance of Hollywood to Faulkner himself - for over two decades he worked there often as a screenwriter - it seemed worthwhile to separate out the texts that make specific reference to that part of the state. Hollywood has been home to the American movie industry since the 1920s. Faulkner began working there in 1932, but never felt at home in the place. The first time "Hollywood" appears in his texts is in the "Appendix" to The Sound and the Fury that he wrote in the mid-1940s. Hollywood is where Caddy meets her second husband: he's a "minor movingpicture magnate" (332); they're divorced five years later. In The Mansion, written after Faulkner left Hollywood for the last time in 1954, the place is used several times as a point of reference (392, 394). The "only sister of old Major de Spain" lives with "her only child" (463) in Los Angeles. And perhaps most pointedly, in this novel Hollywood acquires a Snopes: Montgomery Ward Snopes, who imported French pornography into Yoknapatawpa, is last seen "engaged in some quite lucrative adjunct or correlant to the motion picture industry" (404). That job description is ambiguous, but it may mean Monty has gone back to dealing in pornography. Faulkner makes two other brief references to "Hollywood"; though neither uses Hollywood as a 'Location' in our sense of the term, they are worth noting here as part of the unglamorous pattern. Requiem for a Nun refers, enigmatically, to something called a "trick Hollywood bathroom" (123). And in The Town the "limousines" at the funeral of Melisandre Backus' gangster husband would not have shamed "Hollywood itself" (187).