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Erskine discovered that Faulkner had changed the names of several minor characters. He had even changed the sex of one of them! Bill proved very slippery. He didn't like to admit that he was wrong about anything. He explained calmly, “This doesn't prove a thing, Albert. As I wrote those books, I got to know those people better.” He said, “By the time I did the third volume, I knew a lot more about them than I did in the first volume”--as though they were actually real people, you know.

Well, doesn't any author sort of feel that way though?

What?

That the characters are almost real.

Yes. And he had done these at intervals of several years, you know.

The Snopes family is probably his greatest creation. Those redneck Southern rascals who rose up from the fields by all kinds of connivance to become the richest people in the county and became the gentry, pushing aside the gentler aristocracy from previous generations...those Snopeses were really Bill's greatest achievement, I think.

Something like the Snopes trilogy is done in The Little Foxes by Lillian Hellman. It's about the same kind of people...horrible people who suddenly wax powerful through