An account of the influence on William Faulkner of his friendship with Phil Stone, who, in the first decades of their friendship, served as mentor, muse, patron, editor, agent and publicist to the writer and was one of his first biographers. Susan Snell suggests that Stone was one of Faulkner's principal character studies, and from his life came the raw material out of which Faulkner constructed an important part of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County...