"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

An Analysis of "A Rose for Emily"
William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a very complex story. This short story was Faulkner's "first sale of a short story to a national magazine: Forum" (Skei, 84). Faulkner, born in Mississippi, "began to construct his fictional chronicle of Yoknapatawpha County, (which is) often based directly on the history of his own Lafayette County" (Inge, 136). This is the setting of "A Rose for Emily." Also, Faulkner based the character of Colonel Satoris on his great-grandfather, "Colonel William Clark Falkner" (Inge, 136). Colonel William Clark Falkner had a literary reputation also. He wrote The White Rose of Memphis" (Inge, 136). However, Falkner's talent was not inherited. "He became friends with a young Oxford lawyer named Phil Stone, a graduate of Yale University and a man of somewhat cultivated literary taste, who would provide him with some of the first reading material that would shape his talent" (Inge, 136). Faulkner started out writing poems, then novels, and then short stories. …