The Anatomy of Thrift: Markets, Media, and William Faulkner’s Great Depression

Abstract

This chapter discusses Faulkner's turn to short fiction around 1930 as evidence of his reckoning with the broad market pressures that would leave a powerful imprint on his entire literary career.Reading "Thrift" (1930), one of Faulkner's earliest stories to be published in a national magazine, as a complex meditation on the penetration of economic concerns into every corner of human existence, and considering the story's placement amid Faulkner's most creative years of work (during the early years of the Great Depression), the chapter seeks to demonstrate that a greater attention on the financial motives and constraints in Faulkner's life and work will illuminate many of these texts, and the economic and social histories in which they were produced, in complex ways.