During his most fertile years, from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, Faulkner worked at an astonishing pace, often completing three thousand words a day and occasionally twice that amount. (He once wrote to his mother that he had managed ten thousand words in one day, working between 10:00 A.M. and midnight—a personal record.) ‘I write when the spirit moves me,’ Faulkner said, ‘and the spirit moves me every day.’