ter short stints in the Royal Canadian Air Force and then as a postal service employee, Faulkner, with Stone’s financial assistance, published The Marble Faun, a collection of his poetry. Sales were poor, however, and it was evident that Faulkner’s real talent was in writing fictional short stories and novels. His first novel, Soldier’s Pay, was published in 1926 and was an “impressive achievement…strongly evocative of the sense of alienation experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they seemed no longer a part” (Faulkner 699). His second novel, Mosquitoes, was published just a year later and launched a satirical attack on the New Orleans literary community and its clearly defined members.According to Stone, “anybody could have seen that he had a real talent,” for Faulkner was a born storyteller (Karl 94). According to his grandmother, “… when [he] told you something, you never knew if it was the truth or just something he’d made up” (Zane). Some of the yarns he would spin about himself were clearly tall tales, as when he claimed that he was born in 1826 to a negro slave and an alligator” (Locher 158). Faulkner had a vivid imagination, which he used to embellish the facts of his own life as well as the lives of his fictional characters.He also had a deep affection for his Southern heritage. Remembering that Sherwood Anderson, a writer himself, once told him, “You have to have somewhere to start from…It don’t matter where it was, just so you remember it and ain’t ashamed of it…You’re a country boy; all you know is that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from” (Padgett), he decided to set the remainder of his fiction in his homeland. “I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough...
