LYCOS RETRIEVER 
William Faulkner: New Orleans
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Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, raised in Mississippi and heavily marked by the state. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of Blacks and Whites, and his theme that fiercely intelligent people dwelled behind the facade of good old boys and simpletons.
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NOTE: Faulkner says that the Burdens come from a background of New England Unitarianism. But the Unitarians are noted for championing individual freedom of belief and for their advocacy of a religion based on reason rather than on fixed biblical doctrine. As Faulkner describes the Burdens, they seem to be another variety of Calvinist, just as Joanna's grandfathers first name suggests. Some readers resolve the apparent discrepancy by noting that when Calvin Burden first left New Hampshire the Unitarian Church had not yet evolved far from its Calvinist roots.
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San Antonio itself finds a place in the Faulkner canon with the novel The Wild Palms (1939), published in alternating chapter format with Old Man, partly because of counterpointing thematic material concerning childbirth and abortion. The former narrative concerns itself with the abortion issue, with the unlicensed physician Harry Wilbourne performing a botched abortion on his lover, Charlotte Rittenmeyer, while they are subsisting in a seamy area of San Antonio. Actually, they have recently left a mining community in the mountains of Utah and are heading back to Louisiana and Mississippi, where Charlotte will eventually die of complications and Harry will be indicted for murder. Why Faulkner selected the unfamiliar setting of San Antonio for the sordid details of the abortion is puzzling, but it seems to have held some connection in Faulkner’s mind with New Orleans:
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