SOURCE: Lessig, Matthew. “Class, Character, and Croppers: Faulkner's Snopeses and the Plight of the Sharecropper.” Arizona Quarterly 55, no. 4 (winter 1999): 79-113.

In the following essay, Lessig examines the historical realm of poor Southern whites and Faulkner's portrayal and opinion of them in his Snopes fiction.

Addressing the “recent aberrations of critical discourse” in Faulkner studies, Daniel Hoffman appeals for a criticism of history and memory, arguing that “a writer such as Faulkner can be comprehended only by readers possessing a sympathetic historical imagination to complement his own” (xiv). Faulkner found one such group of readers in the New Critics, who, as Lawrence Schwartz has shown, promoted Faulkner's literary fortunes in the post-war marketplace, both commercial and academic. Many of the founding figures of the New Criticism were, of course, conservative Southerners, some of whom—such as Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, George Marion O'Donnell, and Cleanth Brooks—had participated...