Collection: These 13

Overview
The collection These 13 (1931) gathers thirteen short stories by William Faulkner written during the late 1920s and early 1930s, many of them appearing earlier in periodicals. The pieces span a range of subjects, small-town dramas, wartime reckonings, and unsettling family histories, while repeatedly returning to the social landscape of the American South. Rather than offering a uniform mood, the collection registers Faulkner's restless experimentation with voice and form as he refines the techniques that inform his major novels of the era.
While some stories stand as quiet, elegiac sketches of loss and decline, others erupt in sudden violence or dark irony, revealing the grotesque undercurrents of everyday life. The book captures Faulkner at a moment of consolidation: he is already known for ambitious novels and here tests compressed forms, intensifying the psychological insight and moral ambiguity that would define his later reputation.

Major themes
A pervasive theme is the burden of history, familial, regional, and racial, and how the past shapes perception and action in the present. Characters often carry inherited debts, secrets, or resentments that surface with devastating force, underscoring Faulkner's preoccupation with the persistence of memory and the impossibility of simple reconciliation. The South appears both as a physical setting and a moral landscape marked by decay, entrenched social hierarchies, and the aftermath of defeat and transformation.
Psychological fracture and isolation recur throughout the stories. Faulkner probes grief, guilt, and denial, showing how individuals retreat into private myths or self-justifications. Intimacy frequently breaks down into misunderstanding or cruelty, and moments of tenderness are shadowed by inevitability, suggesting a world in which human connection is fragile and often doomed by circumstance.

Narrative style and craft
Faulkner's prose in These 13 ranges from spare, crystalline observation to ornate, sinuous sentences that accumulate detail like sediment. He experiments with point of view, moving between third-person distance and close interiority, sometimes allowing consciousness to spill into the narrative in fragments or elliptical reveries. This formal restlessness gives the stories emotional force: compressed pieces reach the intensity of a novel through concentrated perspective and cumulative implication.
Dialogue and dialect appear as moral and social markers rather than mere local color, and Faulkner frequently lets speech patterns reveal power dynamics and inner life. The economy of the short form presses his narrative techniques into sharper relief, making each story a study in timing, revelation, and the withholding of information. The result is work that rewards close reading, where silences and narrative gaps often carry as much weight as explicit events.

Reception and legacy
Contemporary responses to These 13 were mixed, with some readers unsettled by Faulkner's density and uncompromising moral vision and others recognizing the power of his craft. Over time the collection has been read as an important waypoint in Faulkner's development, showing how his short fiction both complements and amplifies the themes of his novels. Critics and scholars value the volume for its concentrated experiments in voice and structure as well as its unflinching portrayals of human failure.
Today the stories are often studied alongside Faulkner's larger works for what they reveal about his obsessions and methods: the anatomy of memory, the interplay of private guilt and public history, and the formal strategies that make his fiction enduringly provocative. These 13 stands as a compact demonstration of Faulkner's range and a testament to his ability to make short narratives carry the weight of sweeping moral inquiry.