William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: The Annotated Screenplays

by Sarah Gleeson-White

William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: The Annotated Screenplays presents for the first time and in one volume the five screenplays Faulkner wrote while under contract to Twentieth Century-Fox in the mid 1930s and a sixth he wrote in 1952. An informative introduction describes Faulkner's screenwriting practices, such as adaptation and collaboration, and contextualizes these within a broader genealogy of Hollywood screenwriting and within one of the most important moments in the history of American cinema. Each of the six screenplays appears in full with scholarly annotations, and brief prefatory essays elucidate their evolution over various drafts and with various co-writers.


The edition makes available for the first time and in one volume Faulkner's Fox screen writings, and, with its scholarly apparatus, thus makes a valuable contribution to recent scholarship across a number of fields: Faulkner and film; literature and film/adaptation studies; cinematic modernism; and screenplay studies. It also foregrounds Faulkner's many significant collaborators, such as Zanuck and Howard Hawks, and therefore makes an important contribution to the history of Twentieth Century-Fox under Zanuck.