It’s a striking admission, at once candid and canny, not to mention remarkably timed. In the minutes before reading the opening pages of a work-in-progress that would be hailed as a masterpiece on its publication two years later, Toni Morrison made a point of describing an “exhaustive … personal” engagement with Faulkner that had had “an enormous effect” on her. The intensity of the effect is emphasized even as it is quite deliberately qualified. For Faulkner’s weight left its deepest impression not on Toni Morrison, writer, but on Toni Morrison, reader.