Mr. Cowley’s Southern Saga
This chapter reexamines Malcolm Cowley's efforts to resuscitate Faulkner's reputation by moving our attention away from the Faulkner who earned the esteem of influential critics. Instead, it looks at the ways in which Cowley used Faulkner to write a version of southern history that met the demands of a wartime book industry. The Faulkner that emerges from Cowley's Portable Faulkner was not the purveyor of the grotesque of the 1930s; nor was it the Faulkner of the late 1940s and 1950s who represented “the complexities and paradoxes of Cold War existential angst, artistic freedom, and unrelenting struggle.” Rather, it was the Faulkner who was needed in the national effort defined by the Second World War and its aftermath, the autochthonous Faulkner who loved the land and the people who inhabited it.