Captain Warren

In the 1932 short story "Death Drag" Captain Warren is a well-to-do war veteran who has established himself comfortably in his home town; adults and children alike know him as "an ex-army flyer" who "was in the war" (185, 188). There is actually no clear evidence in the story that Warren's home town is Jefferson, and its likely that if he did live in Yoknapatawpha he would have been mentioned in Flags in the Dust (1929), with its focus on aviators and returning wounded veterans. But when in 1945-1946 Malcolm Cowley collected a set of Faulkner's texts for the Viking Portable Faulkner, he asked Faulkner to draw another map of Yoknapatawpha (like the one he had done for Absalom! a decade earlier), and the map Faulkner drew clearly locates "Death Drag" inside his mythical county. So in what could be called a retro-fitting of that short story into the canon he includes Captain Warren in the 1949 story "Knight's Gambit," which is set just before the U.S. entry into the next world war. In that story Warren is a farmer who lives a few miles from Jefferson, but still called Captain Warren on account of his service as "a flight commander in the old Royal Flying Corps before it became the RAF" (206). Charles Mallison asks for his advice about enlisting in the American Army Air Corps.