Magazine Illustrations
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The first visualizations of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions were the illustrations drawn to accompany the publication of his short stories in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's and Collier's, the large circulation periodicals that Faulkner regularly submitted work to in his quest for income. Although Faulkner occasionally worked directly with the magazines' editors to revise a story, there is no evidence that he had any control over - or even interest in - the way these magazines illustrated his texts. The illustrations can, however, help us appreciate the way Faulkner's world, and the people of different races and classes who inhabit it, appeared to his original readers. The following items are drawn from the William Faulkner Foundation Collection at the University of Virginia's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (http://small.library.virginia.edu/). The illustrations for this war-time story were drawn by F[rederic] R[odrigo] Gruger, a prolific magazine and newspaper illustrator who had also illustrated the five Unvanquished short stories that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post a few years earlier. The war is World War II, but Gruger's decision to include the image of Old Anse McCallum, who has been dead for over a decade, as a Confederate veteran returning from the Civil War locates the patriotism of these southern "tall men" in a context that conflates fighting for the United States with fighting against it. Below right: a composite of the two facing pages.    Citing this source:
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