February - John Duvall
Please join me in congratulating John Duvall, Margaret Church Distinguished Professor of English, on the recent publication of his corrected edition of William Faulker’s Knight’s Gambit through Penguin Random House.
Originally published in 1949, Knight’s Gambit is a collection of six stories written in the 1930s and 1940s that focus on the criminal investigations of Gavin Stevens, the county attorney of Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, where so many of his famous novels are set.
These stories originally appeared in magazines, where editors made substantial changes to Faulkner’s manuscripts before publishing them. Some of these changes seem to have been intended to make the stories conform to prevailing styles, some were made for concision or propriety, and some to remove the regional “Southernness” of Faulkner’s tales. John uncovered edited typescripts that revealed the deletions and changes and allowed him to restore these six stories to their original Faulknerian glory.
Congratulations, Professor Duvall!
David A. Reingold
Senior Vice President for Policy Planning
Justin S. Morrill Dean of Liberal Arts
Professor of Sociology