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a few years ago, I stayed with Jill and her husband at the farm that they inherited. They've just sold that farm. It was too much for them. It's a very big place. See, Bill made a lot of money in the last years of his life--first the Nobel Prize and a couple of the Book-of-the-Month Club choices; and by this time he had been taken up in the colleges and the Modern Library had added books like Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary and Absalom, Absalom. Those books sold by the thousands. Then we had a couple of paperback editions and there were some big movie sales.

Bill's adventures in Hollywood, of course, are a story in themselves. Everybody knows the story of the time that he went out there. Heaven knows why they brought Bill Faulkner there. He was about as much at home in Hollywood as Friedrich Nietzsche would have been, but everybody liked him. He was a likeable man, and he had a lot of drinking companions out there.

One time he came to the boss, Louis Mayer--he was working for MGM--and said that he wasn't able to do much work around the studio. It didn't seem to suit him. He said, “Do you mind if I work at home?" So Mayer said, “No. We'll call you when we want you.” When they wanted him they couldn't find him. What he meant by “home” was Oxford, Mississippi. Mayer thought that he meant home in Beverly Hills. So they found him in Oxford, Mississippi.

Was he working on The Sound and the Fury?