St. Louis, Missouri (Location Key)

St. Louis, Missouri, is almost 300 miles further from Yoknapatawpha than Memphis, which explains Frony phrase "all de way fum Saint Looey" in The Sound and the Fury (293). It is also a much bigger city: its population was already over 100,000 when Calvin Burden moved his family there from New England in the 1850s (in Flags in the Dust), and over 800,000 in the 1930s, when Frony moves there herself to be with her unnamed husband (in "Appendix Compson"). Missouri did not secede from the union, but it was a slave-holding state, and the abolitionist Burden had to leave "Saint Louis" (as Faulkner occasionally spells it) after "killing a man in an argument over slavery" (242). Granny (in The Unvanquished) saw a hot air balloon there before the Civil War. She would have traveled there by riverboat, but the Eads Bridge connected the city to the eastern side of the river in 1874, and when the Mr. and Mrs. Compson went to the World Fair that was held there in 1904, they could have traveled by train. That Fair is mentioned in both The Sound and the Fury and The Hamlet, and in the later novel Labove's basketball team from Frenchman's Bend goes there to win the Mississippi Valley tournament. Most of the other connections between St. Louis and Yoknapatawpha involve insurance and manufacturing companies.