"Wash" (Text Key 251)

This critically acclaimed short story was first purchased for $350 by Harper’s Magazine on 2 November 1933 and subsequently published in February 1934. Later that same year, “Wash” was republished in Faulkner’s short story collection, Dr. Martino and Other Stories. The next year Faulkner revised and interpolated parts of “Wash” into the novel he was writing, Absalom, Absalom!, which was published in 1936. The short story has been republished several times since its initial appearance in Harper’s. It appears in Viking Press’s influential 1946 volume, The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley. In 1950 Random House included “Wash” in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner, and in the same year, the Book Society published The Indispensable Faulkner, which is identical with Cowley’s Portable Faulkner. In 1954, Random House again published “Wash” in The Faulkner Reader: Selections from the Works of William Faulkner, and in the same year Random House also included “Wash” in its Modern Library’s imprint of The Faulkner Reader: Selections from the Works of William Faulkner. More recently, in 1995, Vintage International republished “Wash” in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner. Our Digital Yoknapatawpha representation refers to the version of the story published in the latter volume.

References: Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (Random House, 1974); A. Nicholas Fragnoli, Michael Golay, and Robert W. Hamlin, Critical Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary Response to His Life and Work (Facts on File, 2008).