Email journal: July 22, 2005, Charlottesville, Virginia I flew from Connecticut to Charlottesville, VA via Charlotte, NC on Monday, July 18th. My 9:30am flight was delayed until 12:45 and was representative of the events of the rest of the day and the next. Once I got on the plane, the flight was further delayed due to weather, but fortunately a longer route that required additional fuel opened up and I arrived in North Carolina at 3:15--literally in time to hop off of one plane onto another, but naturally when I arrived in Charlottesville, my luggage wasn’t there and I didn’t not get it back until Tuesday at 7:30pm. Fortunately, UVA is a historic and beautiful campus that was originally designed by Thomas Jefferson (who was an architect in addition to a statesman and so forth) and I was able to get my bearings around the place and take some pictures. Obviously, I did not get to the new and beautiful special collections library until Wednesday and I was able to easily establish a temporary library account. The UVA archive is rich, entailing not only the largest William Faulkner Collection, but much John dos Passos material, and is one of the three major repositories of Thomas Jefferson’s documents. Accordingly, it is a secure operation and essentially works as follows: after stowing belongings in a locker, one uses the computer to browse a database to locate material and place a request with the librarians, they retrieve it for you and buzz you into an otherwise locked reading room in which only laptops, supplied green paper and pencils are permitted. There are thousands of documents in the Faulkner collection, which is rather daunting. In addition, it contains countless works by scholars, most editions of his works, a 30 volume collection of books containing manuscripts, and seemingly most books relating to Faulkner that have been printed. Given Faulkner’s stature and popularity, the policy is that researchers must use microfilm unless one can convince the curator it is essential you need the original. So far, I have been fortunate enough to examine two different files of original material--primarily letters from Faulkner to Bennet Cerf (founder of Random House), Ben Wasson (close friend and one-time agent), and Morton Goldman (another agent), mostly from the 1930s. Other highlights of original material encountered thus far entails: the original agent’s copy of the contract for the publication of The Sound and the Fury dated February 18, 1929; the handwritten draft for his introduction to Sanctuary (in which he makes multiple curious references to The Sound and the Fury); and the original typescript with corrections for the story “An Idyll in the Desert.” I have otherwise examined a large collection of his correspondence with Joan Williams (somewhat of a protégé and romantic interest) on microfilm, and essential out-of-print books that are not in Clark’s library, such as Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926-1962; The Faulkner-Cowley File; and Blotner’s Selected Letters of William Faulkner. I hope to get up to Monticello while I am down here, but seeing as I don’t have a car, I am not quite sure how that will work out yet. Michael