The McCaslin Ledger

The New York Times reports on the real plantation diary that Faulkner used to build his dense novel of slaves and slaveowners, Go Down Moses. Wonderful book. I haven’t read it in a long time. But the surprise is that no one recognized the Faulkner link before — because the diary, otherwise, is known as a detailed source for historians of the South.

I love this stuff. It reminds me of a story about Ezra Pound. I may not be remembering it quite straight, but: in Italy Pound discovered an old book of history — maybe even a book of government documents from Bologna — that contained a number of Shakespeare plots. It dated to Shakespeare’s lifetime, so Pound realized he’d found a source for most of the Italian plays.

     posted 11 February 2010 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. I collect old history and historical non-fiction books. This reminds me I am always amused by direct connections that seem to pop up when you read real-time accounts from 18th and 19th century and classic plots of ancient and English literature/stories. I mean, things like, reading 1901 biographies of William McKinley that make you practically think he was betrayed by insider radicals on the Ides of March. Some of these books are as literal as “Apocalypse Now” vs. “Heart of Darkness,” but some are poetically subtle. I have one 30-plus-volume set from 1870-1900 that is a history of the world and every region of the world is broken down into making them all, practically, read like Shakespeare wrote them! Awesome! I love my almanac collection, too…because in the 20th century they were produced by newspapers and they had to take their readers into account when they wrote the histories of the previous year. LOVE IT! I ramble.

    — E    Feb 15, 01:14 pm    #