In addition to these there is the fine collection of related stories (The Unvanquished, 1938), which Cleanth Brooks rightly called, in an interview with Parini, the best place to begin reading Faulkner.

Those of us who became students of literature before the hegemony of poststructuralism and the "new historicism" may remember being taught to read poetically by such "new critics" as Cleanth Brooks and Lawrence Perrine; and while we soon learned to sacrifice personal taste to the "business" of scholarship (and even, indeed, to give over all notions of "taste" and of esthetic categories generally), such a collection reminds us to renew our pleasure in reading.

Mark Royden Winchell, a professor at Clemson University whose many previous biographies include a 1996 one of the Southern literary critic Cleanth Brooks, tries hard to remedy the neglect of Davidson with this handsome, ambitious work.