Faulkner was out of print in the 1940s

Gerald Howard on “The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction”:

In the mid-1940s every one of William Faulkner’s 20 published works was either out of print or very difficult to find. Faulkner had to grind out screenplays for Hollywood studios to make a living. It took an anthology edited by the critic Malcolm Cowley, “The Portable Faulkner,” to reverse years of neglect and critical abuse and finally get him the recognition (and the Nobel Prize) he deserved.