(New York: Random House), published 19 January 1939, was the eleventh of Faulkner’s nineteen novels and one of only five that are not set in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, the apocryphal Mississippi town and county he created for most of his fiction.

Publication History and Composition

Faulkner originally titled the novel, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, borrowing a phrase from Psalm 137:5: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.” His editors objected to the title because, according to Blotner, they were “afraid it would hurt the book’s sales by arousing anti-Semitic feeling” (399). A more likely reason for their reluctance, however, was that three years earlier Faulkner had published Absalom,

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Citation: Meats, Stephen E.. "The Wild Palms". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 January 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8163, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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