Faulkner, William

Holland was the sister of Faulkner’s father—she retained the spelling of the family name which her nephew had restored to a generations-old orthography. After her husband’s death in 1903, she moved into “The Big House” with her brother’s family, including her seven-year-old nephew “Will.”

Published on the heels of the success of Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner and two years before Faulkner would receive the Nobel Prize, Intruder in the Dust focuses on Lucas Beauchamp, a black farmer accused of murdering a white man. He is exonerated through the efforts of black and white teenagers and a spinster from a long-established Southern family. It was written as Faulkner's response as a Southern writer to the racial problems facing the South. In his Selected Letters, Faulkner wrote: "the premise being that the white people in the south, before the North or the Govt. or anybody else owe and must pay a responsibility to the negro."

Intruder in the Dust is the first Faulkner title in whose screen adaptation he participated; it was shot on location in Oxford. this copy is signed by thirty members of the cast, crew, and production team whose names and roles or job titles (“Sheriff Hampton,” “Special Effects,” “Camera Operator,” “Publicity World Premiere,” etc.) cover the first half-title page and continue beneath Faulkner’s inscription on the second half-title, each in a different ink (two names also appear opposite the first half-title, and another two opposite the title page). Present among these are the signatures of producer and director Clarence Brown, cinematographer Robert Surtees, and actor Will Geer. Production had begun in February 1949 and this copy was inscribed towards the end of filming.

It was possibly on the occasion of a celebratory fish fry at the end of April that this copy was signed by most of the participants, as well as by his second cousin once removed: Holland Falkner Williams Heard, who signed at the bottom of the second list of signatures and dated her entry “September, 1948,” was the daughter of Faulkner’s cousin and childhood playmate.