Prize, professors made writer whose letters were stolen

William Faulkner might have been just another Southern author if it weren't for the Nobel Prize and the fascination of English professors who made the Mississippian's works required reading in their classes.

"In many ways, it is the professors who have made Faulkner's reputation," said Dr. Robert Hamblin, an English professor and director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University.

Hamblin has devoted much of his life to studying and writing about Faulkner, who died in 1962. The recent theft of six letters from Southeast Missouri State University's Rare Book Room in Kent Library has drawn public attention to the school's massive collection of Faulkner books, manuscripts and other writings.

A 43-year-old former Arkansas lawyer and convicted manuscript thief, Robert Hardin Smith of Jacksonville, Ark., has been charged with the crime but has yet to be arrested. The stolen letters, valued at $25,000, have been recovered.

The Faulkner materials are part of the Brodsky collection, which the university acquired in 1989 from St. Louis collector Louis Daniel Brodsky. School officials said it is one of the four largest collections of Faulkner materials in the world and has drawn attention from Faulkner scholars worldwide. Recently, a scholar from Romania expressed an interest in visiting Cape Girardeau to study the university's Faulkner collection.

Name recognition only

But while Faulkner draws the attention of collectors, English professors and manuscript thieves, many Americans have never read his works, Hamblin concedes. Even winning the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature didn't send Americans rushing to buy his books.

"Now they know the name, but they still don't read the books," said Hamblin.

Southeast's collection and its accompanying Center for Faulkner Studies is news to some of the school's own students.

"I don't know anything about it," said Rick Beutel, a junior accounting major from St. Louis, who never heard of Faulkner.

The center is in a quiet corner of Kent Library, down a hall and up a flight of stairs.

"It's in the back in the corner where nobody goes," Beutel said upon learning of the center's location.

To Hamblin, however, Faulkner is one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

"He is the literary Picasso," said Hamblin, who admits that Faulkner -- with his use of dialects and the telling of a story from varied points of view -- is a difficult read.

Hamblin compares Faulkner to fine wine, suggesting that it's an acquired taste that comes from repeated reading of his works.

Faulkner's writings have both tragic and comic elements in them, Hamblin said. "The great writers don't just write comedy or tragedy," he said, sitting in his office in the Center for Faulkner Studies.

Center has UV filters

A large portrait of Faulkner, his face a painted patchwork pattern of differing hues, adorns a wall leading up the stairs to the center. One floor down is the Rare Book Room. The Faulkner materials take up one long wall of bookcases in the room, which is kept cold and dry to best preserve the written works.

"We have filters on the lights to screen out the ultraviolet rays," he said.

In his lifetime, Faulkner wrote 17 novels, 100 or more short stories, a play and at least a dozen movie scripts.

His early novels, such as "The Sound and the Fury," which detailed the collapse of a Southern family, sold few copies. The first printing of that novel totaled 3,000 copies. Published in 1929, it took 16 years to sell all the copies, Hamblin said.

By 1946, all of Faulkner's early works were out of print.

He wrote Hollywood movie scripts from time to time to make ends meet, earning about $500 a week in the 1940s. Southeast has the largest collection of Faulkner screenplays in the world, Hamblin said.

Faulkner wasn't as well paid as many screenwriters, Hamblin said. Producers were worried about Faulkner's drinking problem. "They were never sure he could finish the project," Hamblin said.

"Most of the movie scripts he did were never filmed," said Hamblin. Faulkner's realism was at odds with Hollywood censors, he said. In Hollywood films at that time, men and women had to sleep in separate beds, for example.

"He wrote realistic novels which weren't adaptable to the Hollywood of the 1940s," Hamblin said.

His writings got a boost when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. He actually received the award a year later in Stockholm, Sweden, at the age of 53. "He could pay his bills after that," said Hamblin.

'I'm just a farmer'

Faulkner had a love-hate relationship with the South where he lived, Hamblin said.

He detested racial bigotry and favored integration. "He was about three decades ahead of his time," Hamblin said.

Faulkner would have been amazed that any university would devote a center of scholarship to his writings, Hamblin said.

"I'm just a farmer who likes to tell stories," Faulkner once said.

He didn't do book signings like modern authors do today.

"He may not have signed more than 500 books in his lifetime, and almost 200 of those are in the rare book room," Hamblin said.

"Collecting authors is the same as collecting stamps," Hamblin said. The rarer the stamp or the autographed book, the more valuable it is, he said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123