Hard-Boiled Faulkner?

Nutt Auditorium

This talk is concerned with lowbrow Faulkner—his pulp magazine stories, cheap paperbacks with lurid covers, genre fiction, and work as a screenwriter adapting popular fiction for the movies. Extending David Earle’s work on pulp modernism, I ask how Faulkner’s engagement with these forms of print culture complicate our understanding of his work. I pay particular attention to Knight’s Gambit (1949), a collection of six mystery stories centered on lawyer/detective Gavin Stevens. It was one of the first Faulkner titles published in paperback by New American Library (with lurid cover), and most of the stories were previously published in places including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.