The Second World War plays a smaller role in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha fictions than the First, but three texts refer to various wartime events in Europe. Requiem for a Nun mentions three European locations that were the sites of significant moments in the history of the war. "Warsaw and Dunquerque" appear together in the account of how black farmers and field hands in Yoknapatawpha left the region or became otherwise unavailable for working on the big plantations (193). Although the U.S.
Linda Snopes' story brings Gavin Stevens and V.K. Ratliff to New York City, where the novel spends much of Chapter 7. Linda and her fiance, Barton Kohl, live in an apartment in Greenwich Village that is also Kohl's studio as a scuptor. Ratliff calls the apartment "nice": "plenty of window-lights," "a wall full of books and a piano," and a lot of artwork, pictures and sculptures Ratliff isn't sure how to describe but which the novel indicates are very modern (191). Ratliff and Stevens stay at one unnamed hotel and meet Hoke McCarron at another.
Chapter 21 of Sanctuary tells the comic tale of Virgil Snopes and Fonzo Winbush, who come to the big city of Memphis from their country lives in Yoknapatawpha to attend "the barber's college" (193). The novel never actually shows them at the school, so we have to speculate about where it is and what it's like - nor can we say how well they learn to cut hair, since all the scenes involving them take place in Memphis brothels.
When he becomes a very successful wholesale grocer, Wallstreet Panic Snopes "removes with his family" from Yoknapatawpha and moves to Memphis. The novel provides no clue to where in the city they live, so we have assumed it's in a fashionable part of town.
Mink has been planning to buy a gun to kill Flem in "a Memphis pawn shop" for almost 50 years by the time he reaches it (115). He notes that "the window had not changed" since he saw it so long ago: "the same unwashed glass behind the wire grillework containing the same tired banjos and ornate clocks and trays of glass jewelry" (320).
When in The Mansion Mink claims he has been "over a year in a hospital up in Memphis," the black man for whom he is picking cotton asks if he means "the Govment Vetruns Hospital" (439). Mink of course is trying to disguise the fact that for almost forty years he's been in prison in Mississippi, but there were several real medical facilities for veterans in Memphis by the 1940s, although it's not clear which one the farmer is thinking of. The place we put it on the map is an arbitrary one.
The Memphis Municipal Airport, where Gavin meets Linda on her return from Europe, began operating in the summer, 1929. Given Faulkner's love of flying, the narrative has surprising little to say about the airport as a location, though it does mention "the restaurant" inside the terminal (215).
The "Union Depot in Memphis" (104) opened in 1912. It first appears in the novel as a reference point for big buildings, but later Mink tries to spend the night sleeping inside its "hollowly sonorous rotunda" (317). In is a few blocks away from what the novel refers to as "another depot" (318), Memphis' older Central Station.
