In Print: Knight’s Gambit
Publication Title
Knight’s Gambit: The Resorted Edition
Author
Publisher
Penguin Random House
Publication Date
March 12, 2024
About the Book (from the publisher)
Faulkner’s six detective stories feature attorney Gavin Stevens, a recurring character from Faulkner’s novels, as he investigates violent crimes. This newly restored edition presents the stories the way Faulkner intended them.
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. Scholar John N. Duvall uncovered edited typescripts that revealed the deletions and changes and allowed him to restore these six stories to their original Faulknerian glory.
About the Author
In the last few years, John Duvall has studied issues relating to modernist print culture. This focus led to his scholarly edition of William Faulkner’s 1949 collection of detective fiction, Knight’s Gambit (2022), that restores to the six stories more than 4,000 works cut by magazine editors. Duvall continues to work on matters of racial and sexual identity in 20th- and 21st-century American fiction. He is the author of Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction (2008), Don DeLillo’s UNDERWORLD (2002), The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness (2000), and Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (1990).
Professor Duvall also has edited seven essay collections: Narrating 9/11: Fantasies of State, Security, and Terrorism (2015, with Robert P. Marzec), The Cambridge Companion to American Fiction After 1945 (2012), Faulkner and His Critics (2010), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo (2008), Approaches to Teaching DeLillo’s WHITE NOISE (2006, with Tim Engles), Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies (2002), and Faulkner and Postmodernism (2002, with Ann J. Abadie).
Professor Duvall’s recent graduate courses include Contemporary American Fiction (ENGL 595) and Faulkner and Middlebrow Print Culture (ENGL 678)