It seems appropriate, if not inevitable, that one of our best critics should be the foremost authority on one of our best novelists. Cleanth Brooks, the author of three seminal studies of William Faulkner, has been a serious student of that master craftsman's fiction for more than four decades. In this new collection, Brooks considers many of the important characteristics of Faulkner's work. He focuses more specifically than he has in the past on certain questions and in some instances offers rebuttals to what he considered unfair assessments of Faulkner.