Knight’s Gambit: The Restored Edition

Faulkner’s six dectective 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.

WILLIAM FAULKNER was born in 1897 and raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. One of the towering figures of American literature, he is the author of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, among many other remarkable books. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 and France’s Legion of Honor in 1951. He died in 1962.