so my dream for charlottesville would be that as a gross and as we write this new century in brick and stone and mortar, not just on paper but as we write our story and the landscape i would hope that people would experience, i would hope people would have the experience that i have had a falling in love with the place and having it means so much to you in your own experience of being alive, and i would just hope that they would have that joy that i get every day, and the privilege that i feel i've been able to live here this little city that i love. >> i'm here at the university of virginia library curator of special collections.

she'll be showing us the current exhibit of william faulkner. >> we are in the main gallery of the special collections library at the university of virginia. our exhibition is faulkner's license worked. it surveys the faulkner collection that we have at the library. william faulkner was a great american novelist who was born in mississippi and spent the last few years of his career in the late 1950s at uva. he is best known for his novels, sanctuary, and he was also a poet and a short story writer.

it has been a long time since our last monumental exhibition, even though we often bring individual items out or put them on display in other contexts we have not told the full story and given the public access to a range of materials and collections for some time. it also is the 60th anniversary of his arrival at the university as writer in residence. we still have people coming to visit to tell us about having met faulkner while here. while he was here he was working on his own writing. he spent a lot of time in formal and informal events meeting with students, faculty, community members, female students from local or nearby women's colleges since it was only meant at the time. and other groups to talk about his novels, about the state of literature today and pretty much anything else they asked about. he also enjoyed living in virginia. he always had a dream to learn to fox hunt. he joined the farmington hunt

and we go foxhunting on the weekends whenever he could. we have many wonderful artifacts from his time. many that has come from uva sources. we have the typewriter he is issued by the university with the university property stamp on the back. we have a jacket he wore, as you can see it is pretty torn up and ready. he like to think it's tricky but it's close for long time. he left the jacket hanging in his office when he went on his last trip to mississippi when he passed away. in the pocket with the pipe and some pipe cleaners. we will put the pipe leaders are display. we thought visitors would enjoy that close connection. the collections are so vast it was difficult to decide how to

tell the story of his lifetime. but we decided to do was look at the various personae constructed either by him actively or by the circumstances in which he found himself god is like. structure the episode around those. so there aspects of his personality we tried to cover the personal, professional and lesser-known. for instance i don't think people know that he was a wonderful artist. he drew all the way through his life. people don't know that he did interesting work after he won the nobel as a literary and vascular working for the u.s. state department. we tried to pull out unexpected stories and show some of the most iconic items in the collection. the materials that demonstrate the history are also on display. one that i find incredibly interesting appointment. was placed front and center at the beginning of the exhibition. it is from long before he was born, a receipt for a slave sold by faulkner's grandfather.

we thought it was important to put that in the exhibition to point out how important that history was and how faulkner developed as a writer. these are central to his work. they are revered as a topics covered with brilliance and care throughout his work. we really wanted to make sure that we put that artifact on display is a symbol of the problem he inherited. one of the most interesting aspects is when he spent time in hollywood as a screenwriter. faulkner would not agree with me. he did not like his time in hollywood. it was a job he took writing screenplays for the studios to make money.

he would have a hard time making ends meet because his writing was difficult. books were not selling as well as they would if they were more readable. he needed to find other ways to support his family. screenwriting work for a long time. he did that work off and on for a couple of decades. the items on display are wonderful. probably my favorite item is a fragment of his screenplay for the film, the big sleep which is considered a masterpiece of film for its time. one of his essays in the 50s he refers to himself as having a position of a white southerner. we took that and said what is this white southerner figure that he inhabits? anyone who approaches his work sees him engaging with the problem of race. he saw himself very much is having a challenging position in relation to the african-american community around oxford. members of that community feature in the work. white southerner looks in particular at how faulkner grappled with questions of

racial identity in the 1950s. he was the nobel prize in 1950 from that point on his fame explodes. his books are sold in massive quantities and he is becomes a household name. at the same time the civil rights movement is gathering steam. the base over integration become more vocal and more polarizing in the united states. faulkner begins to be called upon as a public figure to comments upon integration. his even asked abroad in foreign countries as american tell us what you think of this issue because all over the world issues having to do with integration of being reported. there are documents that show him trying hard to figure out how to determine his own position on integration.

what's wonderful is that the show faulkner found himself stuck between different positions. on one hand his view that integration needed to happen put it at odds with a lot of whites mississippi. however he often call for a sl slow, gradualist move towards integration which put him at odds with northerners. he also felt he had a loyalty to the south so he didn't want the north to tell the south what to do. so he is constantly shifting over time as an intellectual and his moment the perspective is unusual and interesting. i found that visitors find a lot to think about in that section. have to say that's probably where i learned the most. we want all audiences to enjoy this exhibition.

if you are fanatic you will love it and if you are not, maybe you head trauma with faulkner in high school, which some people told me they did, we want you to be able to understand his biography. his life stories interesting. we want you to come away with a sense of faulkner as an entire person. the whole person. all aspects of the life story that influenced his ability to write his masterpieces. much of the time was spent struggling to make money and care for the family. it's remarkable to see what he accomplished. we also want people to get a sense of a full range of material that can be found in literary archive. it is a treasure and we are happy to share it. >> we are at the rotunda at the university of virginia. oft,