Recalling Faulkner

The Library of America edition of the novels of William Faulkner has just culminated with a volume containing his first four novels: Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust and, of course, the majestic The Sound and the Fury (the only one of these four that one has actually read). The volume presents each one newly edited and, in many cases, restored with passages that were altered or expurgated by the original publishers. This, say the editors, "is Faulkner as he was meant to be read." David Ulin, book editor of the LA Times, offers an appreciation and an anecdote. (No, not the one about Faulkner and Hemingway in the washroom of a Paris hotel comparing their, er, apparatus. Or was that Fitzgerald?)