William Faulkner’s ‘Twixt Cup and Lip’, written soon after World War I, is being published for the first time.
The one-act comedy is about a modern, free-thinking woman who finds herself courted by two men and changes her mind at the last moment. It was written when the future Nobel laureate was in his early 20s, AP reported.
The book was discovered in the University of Virginia archives by The Strand Magazine managing editor Andrew Gulli. Over the past few years he has tracked down long-lost and obscure works by other authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mark Twain and John Steinbeck.
The play appeared for the first time in the Strand Magazine’s current issue. “Faulkner wrote this at a time of great change in society especially for women,” Gulli told The AP.
“This work is unique in that it showed a side of Faulkner that was comical yet, at the same time, explored the nascent theme of the independent jazz era female which F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker carried on further,” he said.
Faulkner, who died in 1962, is an acknowledged giant of American fiction, but in his early years was more likely to write plays and poetry.
The play’s title is lifted from an old English expression “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” meaning a seemingly settled event can still unravel. But readers will find nothing suggesting the tragic vision and anguish about the southern past that made “Absalom, Absalom,” “The Sound and the Fury” and other Faulkner novels some of the most influential and haunting works of the 20th century.
