Noel Polk 1943-2012

Noel Polk was a teacher, critic, memoirist, and editor par excellence. He will be remembered for restoring the texts of William Faulkner's novels (in editions for the Library of America) to what Faulkner wrote as opposed to what Faulkner's editors thought he should have written. Polk's work on The Sound and the Fury was particularly illuminating; he capped his labor on this most difficult of Faulkner's works by publishing, shortly before his death, a Folio Society edition of the novel printed in the colored inks that the author had wanted to use to signal the time shifts in Benjy's monologue. Polk also restored the text of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men to the version that Warren originally created. This restoration sparked an exchange between Polk and Joyce Carol Oates, who objected to the de-editing that is sometimes performed by scholarly editors with access to original manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and correspondence.

Polk was a talented and perceptive critic of Faulkner, Warren, Eudora Welty, and other southern writers. His essay on George Washington Harris's Sut Lovingood is still, for many students of southern humor, the most penetrating assessment of the book that has appeared in print. Polk's prose style was quirky, humorous, and individual. He collected his best interpretive essays in a volume entitled Children of the Dark House, published in 1996; his memoir Outside the Southern Myth appeared in 1997. For a good example of Polk as memoirist, see his remembrance "Living Outside History," published in the American Scholar for autumn 2010.

A native of Picayune, Mississippi, Polk spent his academic career in the South. He was educated at Mississippi College and the University of South Carolina. He held faculty positions at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he edited the Southern Quarterly; and at Mississippi State University, where he was editor of the Mississippi Quarterly, taking over five years behind and getting the journal back on schedule in three to four years! He lectured in France, Russia, Australia, and Japan, taking time during his visits to explore those countries. Loyal to the South and to its literary heritage, he was instrumental in founding the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978 and was a frequent participant in reading programs and conferences in his native state.

Noel was a gifted teacher who once told me that, of all his classroom assignments, he most enjoyed teaching a sophomore-level year-long survey of Western literature, beginning in the fall with Homer and moving through Virgil to Shakespeare to Cervantes and onward, ending in the springtime with Faulkner. Noel performed a signal service to pedagogy by refusing to accept any student paper that contained a sentence cast in the passive voice.

Noel Polk was inventive, witty, and modest; he was an exemplary father and grandfather and was a loyal friend. He will be greatly missed in the community of southern letters.