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“WITH LOVE, BILL”: BIG WOODS, WONDERFUL PRESENTATION COPY
TWICE INSCRIBED BY FAULKNER—ONCE TO HIS LOVER, ELSE JONSSON

FAULKNER, William. Big Woods. Decorations by Edward Shenton. New York: Random House, (1955). Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition of this illustrated collection of Faulkner’s hunting stories, inscribed by the author to his long-time correspondent and lover, Else Jonsson, on the front free endpaper, “For Else, with love, Bill,” and additionally inscribed in the year of publication on the title page, “William Faulkner, New York, 20 Oct. 1955.” Faulkner rarely signed his works, and then primarily to people he knew well. So affectionate an inscription is particularly rare.

Faulkner connected four previously published stories—“The Bear,” “The Old People,” “A Bear Hunt” and, for the first time in book form, “Race at Morning”—“with lyrical passages, mostly drawn from published sources, but evocatively revised and structured? This entire collection might be considered an elegy for the challenged wilderness, an ecologist’s lament. In an odd way, this remains one of Faulkner’s most compelling books, ingenuously reworked from previous material? His powers of revision were, it seems, as important as his powers of vision” (Parini, 371-72). This copy inscribed to Faulkner’s lover Else Jonsson. While in Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize, Faulkner “met the attractive and intelligent widow of Thorsten Jonsson, Else. Fluent in English and a knowledgeable one-time resident of New York’s Greenwich Village, she and Faulkner struck it off, and he was put at ease in surroundings that otherwise might have driven him to flee. They forged a friendship on the spot: the woman recently widowed, her late husband a man who had admired Faulkner, and the writer himself, personally miserable in his domestic life and now feeling alone and isolated” (Karl, 814). The two become romantically involved, corresponding at length and meeting several times, in Stockholm and elsewhere, over the next decade. Peterson A44.1. Brodsky 373. Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with light edge-wear. Because Faulkner rarely signed his books apart from limited editions, copies such as this are most desirable. An attractive and most desirable presentation copy.