The Quicks are a Frenchman's Bend family who are hard to place on either a family tree - is Lon Quick the same person as Solon Quick? - or a map; in some texts they're farmers, in others they own a sawmill as well - or perhaps instead. But we assume Ben Quick and his son Isham (in "Tomorrow") live in the same place as Lon Quick (in As I Lay Dying and Solon Quick (in "Shingles for the Lord"), and that it is a farm. According to "Shingles," the Quicks own the farm, which in Dying is large enough to include the forty-acre patch that Jewel Bundren clears.
The "board tree" where most of "Shingles for the Lord" takes place is probably a large cedar or a pine. Res Grier, Solon Quick and Homer Bookwright spend most of the day splitting shingles from "bolts" - large sections cut from the tree's trunk (31). Shingles split from straight-grained wood with a froe (also spelled "frow," and named from the to-and-fro motion by which a shingle is split off from the bolt) were a common roofing material in rural areas.
All three of the stories in what could be called, a bit hyperbolically, the Grier trilogy mention the farm owned by Old Man Killegrew. It's where Res Grier (in "Shingles for the Lord") goes to borrow a tool, and where (in "Two Soldiers" and "Shall Not Perish") his two sons go to stand outside Killegrew's window in the evenings and listen to the news on the radio that the old man has to play loudly for his almost-deaf wife.
Although many of the families in Frenchman's Bend are tenant farmers or sharecroppers, the Grier family that is at the center of three stories at the time of World War II - "Two Soldiers," "Shingles for the Lord," "Shall Not Perish" - has apparently owned their land since before the Civil War. These stories are all narrated by the family's unnamed younger son, who in the first one describes his home as a "little shirttail of a farm" (84); in the last story its size is given as seventy acres.
Submitted by napolinj@newsch... on Sun, 2013-03-10 11:41
The eldest son of one of the leading families in Yoknapatawpha, Quentin is a major character in two of Faulkner's major novels, The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Nine years old in the events of this story, Quentin developed a close bond with Nancy, one of his family's domestic servants.
Stephen Railton, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the creator of Digital Yoknapatawpha, and directed the project from 2011-2023. Since the mid-1990s most of his time has been spent in virtual reality, exploring how electronic technology can help scholars, teachers and students appreciate the story of American literature and culture in new ways. Among the other major online resources, he has created are Mark Twain in His Times, Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture, and Faulkner at Virginia.
Steven Knepper is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies at Virginia Military Institute. He is the associate editor of the Robert Frost Review and the author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond (SUNY, 2022). He has published essays, poems, and book reviews in a number of journals. As a graduate student at the University of Virginia, he was part of the main production team for Faulkner at Virginia: An Audio Archive.
Taylor Hagood is Professor of American literature at Florida Atlantic University. His publications include Faulkner's Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth; Following Faulkner: The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha's Architect; and Faulkner, Writer of Disability, winner of the C. Hugh Holman Award for Best Book in Southern Studies. He has published articles on Faulkner and served as President of the William Faulkner Society (2018-2021).
Garrett Morrison is a doctoral candidate in English at Northwestern University. He specializes in the literature of community and place, and his dissertation explores the social and spatial dimensions of print culture in the nineteenth-century American West.
Johannes Burgers is an Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at James Madison University in Virginia and the Co-Director of Digital Yoknapatawpha. Together with Chris Rieger, he directed Teaching and Learning Faulkner in the Digital Age, an NEH grant-funded project to add new learning modules to the site's teaching and learning section. He works on advanced data visualizations of DY's data, and has published in venues such as Mississippi Quarterly, Cultural Analytics, and Digital Humanities Quarterly.
