“We heard that he was coming.” That was what the head stenographer at Warner Bros. said, recalling the day the author William Faulkner set foot on the studio lot in 1942. Here was the most famous resident of Oxford, Mississippi (population 5,000), in—of all places—Tinseltown. The tweed and pipe just seemed out of place with the neon and palm trees.
But although Faulkner will forever be identified with his life among the cedars in Oxford—a man “deeply, almost mystically attached to the land,” as Time memorialized him in 1964, complete with a Delta lilt—his years as a screenwriter in Hollywood were not a mere hiccup in his biography. For it was here, working off and on for two decades in an industry that Faulkner once said was “too much for anybody raised in Mississippi to see all at once,” that he had two major affairs. One was professional—he courted a relationship with one of the most prestigious directors in the most glamorous business on earth. The other was personal—a transformative romance with a beautiful script supervisor who called him the love of her life.
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