| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Faulkner's County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha. By Don H. Doyle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xxiv, 458 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8078-2615-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-4931-6.)

Despite its title, this is not really a book about William Faulkner. Rather, Don H. Doyle has served up something far more unusual and badly needed—a first-rate community study set in the Deep South. 1

Employing the tools of the new social history, he has traced the development of Lafayette County, Mississippi, from its initial habitation by Chickasaw Indians up to the early twentieth century. The result is a superb history of southern society in microcosm. Lafayette was of course also Faulkner's home county on which he based his fictional Yoknapatawpha. This allows Doyle the chance to compare the novels with actual events, but that represents a nifty bonus rather than the main story. 2

The portrait that emerges is one of a community characterized by "constant motion." Instead of the stable "traditional, hierarchical society" that so many have assumed typified the antebellum South, Doyle finds a frontier filled with raw ambition whose residents tended to be young, male, unmarried, and incredibly mobile. Over two-thirds of those listed in the 1850 census were gone a decade later, most following the "siren call of the next frontier" by heading for fresh land in Texas. Although some people did migrate in tandem with kin or friends, this incessant mobility for the most part turned Lafayette County into "a shifting assembly of passing strangers—strangers to the land and to one another." . . .

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