DIGITAL TOUR: Jerry Pinkney: Imaginings

These 13 (1979)

First published in 1931, These 13 by William Faulkner was the author’s first mass-release short story collection. It includes many of Faulkner’s most acclaimed and frequently anthologized short stories. After immersing himself in Faulkner’s narratives, Pinkney provided eye-catching illustrations for each of the thirteen stories in the collection. In That Evening Son, African American domestic worker Nancy Mannigoe fears that her common-law husband is seeking to murder her because she is pregnant with a white man’s child.

Carcassonne is a city in southwestern France that is the site of one of the finest medieval fortifications in all of Europe. Though William Faulkner never visited Carcassonne, it came to represent for him a symbol of the creative imagination. In the story, Luis, the owner of a cantina, allows a pauper-poet to sleep in the garret. Though trapped in poverty and living in a rat-infested room, the poet dreams of heroic deeds and romantic transcendence.