Freakonomics real estate video

Brigitte Dale's "How to Be Popular"

Go Down, Moses Diary

from

William Faulkner on the Web:

Diary that inspired Go Down, Moses discovered

A 19th-century diary from a plantation in Holly Springs, Mississippi, apparently inspired the commissary ledger that was so instrumental in Go Down, Moses. From a Feb. 10 article in The New York Times:

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.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

Read the entire article online at www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/books/11faulkner.html.

6 September 2010

http://whoknew.news.yahoo.com/?vid=21719543

They leave out the part about how Grover Cleveland also brutally supressed striking Pullman workers, and wanted to burnish his image. Also left out: that the US doesn't celebrate labor day on May 1st because "May Day" came to have socialist connotations for some. Of course nobody pays me to be so pedantic in real life, but I can be so here.