Warren's Farm (Location Key)

Located a few miles from town, this farm is where in "Knight's Gambit" Charles Mallison visits Captain Warren, who is now a farmer but who "had been a flight commander in the old Royal Flying Corps" during World War I (206). As a site Warren's farm provides an interesting example of how responsive the demographics of Yoknapatawpha were to the needs of Faulkner's imagination. Warren appears in the earlier "Death Drag," where there is no mention of either his farm or Yoknapatawpha; his hometown in that story could be almost anywhere in the South. But a dozen years after Faulkner published "Death Drag," Malcolm Cowley chose to include the story in The Portable Faulkner he was editing for Viking. As part of that project, Cowley asked Faulkner to create another map like the one he'd drawn for Absalom! The map Faulkner drew in response gives all the texts in the anthology a place of some kind on the map, including a previously unmentioned Yoknapatawpha "Airport" as the location for "Death's Drag." When he wrote "Knight's Gambit" a few year's later, he decided retroactively to strengthen the connection between the story and the county by going back to Warren as a character and providing him with this farm not far from Jefferson. (You can see the map Faulkner drew for Cowley in the "Faulkner and Maps" display elsewhere in Digital Yoknapatawpha.)