Originally published in 1949, William Faulkner's Knight's Gambit is a
collection of six stories written in the 1930s and 1940s that focus on
the criminal investigations of Yoknapatawpha's long-time county
attorney, Gavin Stevens?a man more interested in justice than the law.
All previous and current editions of Knight's Gambit have been based
on the first edition, which is fraught with a number of problems. Since
tear sheets of the five previously published stories were used in
setting the first edition, the original Knight's Gambit is a
hodgepodge of various magazines? house styles with no consistency in
punctuation and spelling conventions from story to story.
Far greater issues arise, however, from the substantive (and sometimes
substantial) changes magazine editors made to Faulkner's prose. These
changes were made variously for concision, propriety, or magazine
design. Sometimes northern editors removed the southernness of
Faulkner's stories, either out of ignorance of the South or in order to
appeal to a mass audience. Using four previously unknown Faulkner
typescripts, along with other manuscript and typescript evidence, John
N. Duvall presents an edition of Knight's Gambit that restores over
four thousand words that editors cut from the stories.
Also included is an introduction by Duvall discussing the role of
detective fiction and popular magazines in creating a different kind of
postwar readership for Faulkner that paves the way for the eventual
republication of Faulkner's modernist masterpieces. The new edition
enables readers to reevaluate the stories of Knight's Gambit and their
place in Faulkner's career as a short story writer.
