^{Note 1 in page 652} Citations of Faulkner's works are run into the text as far as possible. They refer to the original editions except for Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying (Modern Library editions), Sartoris (1951 reissue), and the short stories, which are cited from Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York, n.d.).

^{Note 2 in page 652} G. T. Buckley, “Is Oxford the Original of Jefferson in William Faulkner's Novels?” PMLA, lxxvi (Sept., 1961), 447–454.—Hereafter cited as Buckley.

^{Note 3 in page 652} For example, in The World of William Faulkner (Durham, N. C., 1952, p. 104), Ward Miner says that the parallels between Oxford and Jefferson “make us more easily comprehend what is wrong at the end of The Sound and the Fury when Luster turns the carriage to the left at the Confederate monument on the square. Traffic around the square is one way, and Luster is going against it, since the Oxford traffic pattern would demand that he go right at the monument.” But this one-way traffic around the square has been legislated since The Sound and the Fury. Under the old system, one could go either clockwise or counterclockwise, keeping to the right in either case. For all Luster's flightiness, he certainly understood traffic patterns better than Benjy did. The actual point is quite different. The drive to the cemetery is a sort of ritual pastime for Benjy. It is described early in the book (pp. 11–13), and at the end, before Luster sets out, Dilsey, knowing that it is a set ritual, lays great stress on his knowing the way, and he promises to go “same way T. P. goes ev'y Sunday” (p. 398). When he turned left at the Confederate monument, Benjy began to bellow. “There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound” (p. 400). This is not the reaction of a passenger noting a minor traffic violation, but of an idiot snatched from the security of his cosy routine and plunged into the terrors of the unknown. This interpretation is borne out by Faulkner's notation on the map accompanying Absalom, Absalom!—“Confederate Monument which Benjy [not traffic] had to pass on his left side.”

^{Note 4 in page 652} Letter to the author from Mr. Arthur C. Carlson, Press Relations Department, Illinois Central Railroad, 25 October 1961.

^{Note 5 in page 653} The World of William Faulkner, pp. 103 ff.

^{Note 6 in page 653} Mississippi 334 (still known locally as “Old 6”) is, with some minor changes, the road to Varner's as it appears in most of Faulkner's novels. It crosses Yellowleaf (Faulkner's “Whiteleaf”) Creek, turns east along the edge of the Yocona River bottom, and, twelve miles from town, passes the little community formerly known as Cornish—Varner's Crossroads—where Mississippi 331 turns off south to cross the river.

^{Note 7 in page 654} It was also here, “in a cave they dug in the big ditch behind the school house,” that “Byron Snopes's children out of a Jicarilla Apache squaw” cooked and ate Mrs. Widrington's five-hundred-dollar Pekinese (The Town, pp. 362–364).

^{Note 8 in page 654} Buckley, p. 450.

^{Note 9 in page 656} This route along the railroad took him by Sartoris Station (College Hill Station), and as he approached town he passed the crest of the grade where Lucas Burch, alias Brown, hopped a freight train and disappeared from Jefferson (Light in August, p. 417).

^{Note 10 in page 656} To Mink it would still have been College Hill Street, at Stone's Crossing. Some years ago the street names which had grown up naturally in Oxford—North Street, South Street, Depot Street, Hash Row, etc.—were replaced by an arbitrarily assigned set of presidential avenues and numbered streets. For the reader's convenience I use the new names, though I doubt if they seem real to Faulkner any more than they do to me. The older names show up occasionally in his works. See Footnote 11 for an example.

^{Note 11 in page 656} He was at the same place where Charles Etienne de Saint Velery Bon would turn up about once a year “either blind or violently drunk in the negro store district on Depot Street” (Absalom, p. 209).

^{Note 12 in page 656} Parts of Christmas' route are covered by other characters in Faulkner. Christmas walked from the square halfway to the station on Jackson Avenue and then crossed over a short block and went the rest of the way on Van Buren Avenue. Mink Snopes walked the whole distance on Jackson (The Mansion, pp. 34–35), and Horace Benbow rode—in a trip described in minute detail—the whole way from the station to the square on Van Buren (Sartoris, pp. 165–166).

^{Note 13 in page 657} To avoid confusion, I use quotation marks to designate the place called “Oxford” in Faulkner's novels, and use the name without quotation marks to designate the actual town in which Faulkner lives.

^{Note 14 in page 657} This is the figure given in Light in August (p. 11), and is the map-distance, both on Faulkner's maps (where Sutpen's and Varner's are equidistant from Jefferson), and on the actual county and highway maps. In other works the distance from Jefferson to Varner's is regularly given as 20 or 22 miles, probably in order to make the hamlet more remote. This greater distance would make the impossibility of “Oxford's” position even more striking.

^{Note 15 in page 657} See The Hamlet, p. 120; The Town, p. 290; The Mansion, pp. 141, 202; Absalom, pp. 128, 311, 319; The Unvanquished, pp. 245, 248.

^{Note 16 in page 657} Buckley, p. 448.

^{Note 17 in page 657} Miner (p. 104) sees in the omission of the Sardis Reservoir an example of Faulkner's “resistance to change.” But this lake is not ignored. Like the University, it is moved to “Oxford.” The boy in “Two Soldiers” refers to “that Government reservoy up at Oxford” (Collected Stories, p. 81).

^{Note 18 in page 657} In Sanctuary (pp. 213–214), Horace Benbow makes the trip by rail, with a change at Holly Springs, which is here called by its right name in its accurate relationship to “Oxford” and Oxford.

^{Note 19 in page 658} See Maud Morrow Brown, “William C. Falkner, Man of Legends,” GaR, x (1956), 437 and 439, for an account and photograph of this monument.

^{Note 20 in page 658} This lane, paved, has become North 16th St. Faulkner now lies buried close beside it.