Graduate Student Tracks Down Lost Teleplays by Faulkner

William Furry, a graduate student in the English program at the University of Illinois at Springfield, made a significant literary discovery while on a recent research trip to the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City. Furry was in New York to view early, rare television adaptations of the short fiction of William Faulkner, and while there tracked down two Faulkner teleplays previously believed to be lost or destroyed.

The teleplays, The Brooch and Shall Not Perish, were written in the early 1950s for Lux Video Theatre, a series produced by the well-known soap company. The teleplays aired in 1953 and 1954 and represent the first attempts to adapt Faulkner's work for the medium.

Furry, working with Lever Brothers archivist James Taylor, traced the teleplays to the J. Walter Thompson Advertising Agency archives, housed in the special collections department of the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The scripts were on microfilm and had never been catalogued within the general collection.

Furry, who is writing about the early television adaptations of Faulkner's work for his master's thesis, had been searching for the teleplays at various libraries and Faulkner collections around the country for more than a year.

"No one had ever asked to see the scripts before", Taylor told Furry. Because the scripts were in an advertising archives and not in a television or literary collection, Taylor speculated, no one in Faulkner research had stumbled upon them.

According to Furry, the scripts have never been published. "The Brooch," first published in Scribner's magazine in January 1936, was dramatized on Lux Video Theatre on April 2, 1953. According to some accounts, Faulkner dashed off the script in less than 48 hours and earned $1,000. The short story "Shall Not Perish" was first published in the July-August 1943 issue of Story magazine. Faulkner was paid $25 for the story, which had been rejected by eight other magazines prior to publication. Faulkner's teleplay of "Shall Not Perish," which aired on February 11, 1954, earned him $1,500.

The finding of the teleplays is a significant contribution, and Furry's research "will help fill out the Faulkner record," says Robert Hamblin, director of the William Faulkner Research Center at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Furry's sleuthing on the Faulkner trail may not have ended with the discovery of the missing scripts. The original kinescopes--motion pictures made directly from the television screen--of The Brooch and Shall Not Perish also are on the missing list. As with the scripts, Furry has been told they probably were destroyed long ago. He's not so sure. "I have a feeling they do exist," he said.

For more information, call Furry at 217-753-2226 or 217-525-2518.