Journal Entry 1 by Vasha from Ithaca, New York USA on Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Originally published in 1942 as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, the first edition’s title met with Faulkner’s disapproval; despite the short-story format, Faulkner considered the work a novel, and reference to the “other stories” was subsequently dropped. Seven stories, mainly but not exclusively about the McCaslin family plantation, are here set side by side. Initially it is hard to see the common thread between them; for example the link between “Pantaloon in Black,” the story of the grief-unto-death of a giant African-American timber yard worker in 1941, and “Was,” the first story, set in 1859, about a runaway slave, a game of poker, and the preservation of the celibate amity of Buck and Buddy McCaslin, twin inheritors of the McCaslin lands, seems tenuous indeed.

But by the end of the book, connections, such as the focus on black mobility, emerge. The social mobility of wage-earning non-agricultural workers and runaway slaves threatened white dominance by late 1941; U.S. entry into the Second World War had restarted the Great Migration of black workers from the South, with labor needs in the North stimulated by the war. As black workers took to the roads and rails, so the white landowning class suffered its own social death.

The disjunctions in the novel are evidence of the difficulty in recognizing that a revolution in the region’s long-preserved archaic labor practices would mean that the South may cease to be Southern, at least outside the realm of elegy. — Richard Godden in 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die 

Journal Entry 2 by 1001-library at Helsinki, Uusimaa Finland on Sunday, April 10, 2011

Thanks so much for your donation Vasha!

This book is now part of the 1001-library. If you want to take this book from the library but don't know how to proceed, please refer to the 1001-library bookshelf.
 

Journal Entry 3 by Vasha at Ithaca, New York USA on Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Reserved to send to grovalskii 

Journal Entry 4 by grovalskii at Zehlendorf, Berlin Germany on Saturday, August 13, 2011

book arrived today. Thanks Vasha!