William Faulkner remarked on more than one occasion that he was a farmer, not a literary man (LIG 59, 169, 234). “I wonder,” he wrote to a young woman in 1953, “if you have ever had that thought about the work and the country man whom you know as Bill Faulkner – what little connection there seems to be between them”; in the same letter he marveled at “the amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made” (SL 348). Such poses, combined with his self-deprecating sense of humor, obscure the vibrant intellectual life he actually lived. During his three years as postmaster at the University of Mississippi branch in Oxford, for example, when he would not distribute magazines to patrons until he had finished reading them, he had access to and obviously read an eclectic range of magazines, from numbers of The Dial containing T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land in 1922 to the first issue of Time in 1923. He had an intense few years of reading and study with Phil Stone, jobs in bookstores and bookkeeping in New York and New Haven, and travels to Europe, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast during which he continued to absorb the ideas of his day and test them against the people he observed. And those instances are drawn only from the first twenty-five years of his life.