Mississippi Plantation Diary That Inspired William Faulkner Discovered – NYTimes.com:
The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel ‘Go Down, Moses’ comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their ‘scarred and cracked backs’ and ‘yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink’ — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.
