Coming home to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1918 after a stint in the Royal Flying Corps, young William Faulkner was arty and dandified. He sometimes was seen in his airman’s uniform, and he affected English manners. His pose amused some of his townsmen, and joking behind his back, they called him “The Count” and “Count No ‘Count.”

During this period Ben Wasson met Faulkner at the University of Mississippi, where both were students. Their interest in art and literature drew them together. Later Wasson became Faulkner’s first literary agent, as well as an adviser and sounding board. In New York Wasson edited a Faulkner manuscript into a readable length. It was published as Sartoris. Also, Wasson helped Faulkner to place The Sound and the Fury with a new York publisher. Their friendship lasted for more than thirty years as their paths crossed and recrossed in New York, Hollywood, and Mississippi.

In Count No ‘Count Wasson muses over this long and close relationship in anecdotal accounts which he calls flashbacks.

Wasson depicts a Faulkner who is humorous, occasionally naive, aggressive, and loving. At times he is the most courteous of gentlemen. At other times he is a tragic figure attempting to deal with griefs and disappointment by lapsing into alcoholic binges. The reader will discern a Faulkner whose artistic and creative nature produced sometimes bizarre behavior and destructive drives for achievement.

In 1952, Faulkner noted the exceptional nature of the South when he characterized it as “the only really authentic region in the United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between man and his environment.”

The essays collected in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South explore Faulkner’s environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls the “ecological counter-melody” of his texts. “Ecology” was not a term in common use outside the sciences in Faulkner’s time. However, the word “environment” seems to have held deep meaning for Faulkner. Often he repeated his abiding interest in “man in conflict with himself, with his fellow man, or with his time and place, his environment.”

Eco-criticism has led to a renewed interest among literary scholars for what in this volume Cecelia Tichi calls, “humanness within congeries of habitats and en-vironments.” Philip Weinstein draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus. Eric Anderson argues that Faulkner’s fiction has much to do with ecology in the sense that his work often examines the ways in which human communities interact with the natural world, and François Pitavy sees Faulkner’s wilderness as unnatural in the ways it represents reflections of man’s longings and frustrations. Throughout these essays, scholars illuminate in fresh ways the precarious ecosystem of Yoknapatawpha County.

Joseph R. Urgo, Oxford, Mississippi, is chair of the English department at the University of Mississippi. His books include Faulkner’s Apocrypha, Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture, and In the Age of Distraction, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Ann J. Abadie, Oxford, is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. She has coedited Faulkner and His Contemporaries, Faulkner and War, Faulkner and Postmodernism, and Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect, among other Faulkner volumes, all published by University Press of Mississippi.