Email journal: August 9, 2005, Charlottesville, Virginia The week of July 31 was my last down at UVA, so I tried to get through as much material as possible. Monday started early and slow as I spent the morning examining microfilm of letters from William Faulkner to his wife and daughter in Mississippi from Hollywood in 1942-44 (at the time he was working on screenplays for Warner Bros.). Overall, these letters contained nothing of use to the project and were rather melancholy. After lunch, however, I was fortunate enough to discover three boxes containing some 2000 pages of correspondence between Faulkner and Random House spanning from 1931 to beyond his death in 1962. It took me until Thursday afternoon to get through this material, but it was highly relevant. William Faulkner never had a strong relationship with his father, who died in 1932, and it is clear that Random House, and particularly the VP, Robert K. Haas, acted as a kind of surrogate. For instance, The Pulitzer Prize winning A Fable (1954) was begun in the early 1940s and Random House allowed him monthly advances on it for years so he could continue to write; which was a rarity, as Albert Erskine (chief editor) noted to an inquiring author, they receive more completed manuscripts than they can keep up with, so advances are particularly rare. It was also peculiar considering Faulkner was not a commercial success at this point. On many other occasions he wrote them regarding legal complications with his unfavorable Warner Bros. contract, and they were able to help free him from it. Furthermore, Bennet Cerf and Haas often had dinner parties in Faulkner's honor whenever he traveled to New York. The first box, which spanned 1931 into the 1940s, was the most fascinating and useful. In it I was also able to find valuable correspondence between Faulkner and Robert Linscott (RH editor) regarding an introduction that never materialized to the 1946 Modern Library joint edition of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. After I finished with the three boxes of correspondence, I found a box concerning a visit and speech Faulkner made at the University of Oregon in 1955. Initially this sounded quite promising, but it merely contained some professor's illegible notes, an atrocious forty-page account of Faulkner's visit the professor unsuccessfully tried to publish in The New Yorker and Harper's (seriously, at least 25 pages of this was him sharing his anxiety and anticipation, detailing thoroughly what he did, read and felt for three days prior to Faulkner's arrival and contained a marginal amount of quotes from Faulkner himself), and a transcript of Faulkner's speech that was published by Faulkner in Harper's anyway. On Tuesday night I left my room at 10:45 pm to make a phone call and I had left my back-pack and notebook on the bed. I came back in and went to sleep at 12 without paying much attention and the next morning, I found myself searching my room from top to bottom for my notebook - which of course contained all of my notes so far compiled. I was unsuccessful and put in a full day at special collections, went to dinner, and called my roommate - he didn't know anything about it. At 8:15 pm in the library I saw my neighbor and inquired about it, and after describing it, he informed me that he accidentally mistook it for his the night before and had it. So I was pretty miserable for about twelve hours, but fortunately it all worked out. The lesson is, to reiterate from last time: it is imperative, not only for time concerns, that anyone interested in doing this type of research have a laptop and regularly back their material up on CD, email it to yourself, etc. I flew home without event, in pleasant contrast to the flight down, on the morning of Friday August 5. I consider the trip a great success. I feel the knowledge I acquired not only of Faulkner, but the research process itself, was invaluable. Also three weeks seemed to be a good amount of time - there were many items I didn't look at, but it seems that most of the ground pertaining to my project was covered. Best, Michael