Selling Books from William Faulkner's First Writing Room

Before William Faulkner moved to Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi to create Yoknapatawpha County, he rented a room in New Orleans’ French Quarter for six months, long enough to write his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay. He watched people on the street and dined with them—beggars and colonels, tourists and artists, drunks and longshoremen—and began writing about them, selling a series of “sketches” to The Times-Picayune and The Double Dealer to pay his rent. From experiences and characters he met here in 1925, Faulkner set his second novel, Mosquitoes, on Lake Pontchartrain, and returned to New Orleans as the setting for Pylon.

Faulkner’s experience in the little brick room at 624 Pirate’s Alley was formative.

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