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Max Putzel set out to solve a mystery. He wanted to understand how the ambience of William Faulkner’s home place inspired the author’s best work. The mystery led him on a microscopic search of Faulkner’s manuscripts as he tried to determine what the author wrote when and how Faulkner revised his best work on a journey from failed poet to great novelist.
“I can only hope,” Putzel wrote in his preface to Genius of Place, “that the story I have to tell and the sometimes simplistic explications of Faulkner will make my favorite twentieth-century writer accessible to readers still put off by his gnarled and thorny style. He is not the first great writer who found it necessary to wrench and twist the English language in order to make it say what he meant.”
 Putzel called his book “an explorer’s log” with “the inevitable traces of confusion and doubt that beset a singlehanded voyager as he rounds an unfamiliar headland, coasts an uncharted coral reef, or penetrates some many-mouthed black river walled by jungles said to harbor unfriendly natives. The shifting angle of vision and the changes of mood that assailed me on my voyage must inevitably have left their mark and robbed my journal of the unity you have a right to expect. I can only regret that so many who helped me embark and gave me hospitable cheer on the way are not on hand to welcome me back.”
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