Lewis Gannett. “Big Woods.” New York Herald Tribune, October 14, 1955, p. 27.

This is Mr. Faulkner's hymn to the Mississippi he has lived and loved. The dust-jacket calls the book “The Hunting Stories of William Faulkner.” Indeed, it consists of two of Mr. Faulkner's finest stories, “The Bear” and “The Old People,” somewhat rewritten, which appeared in “Go Down, Moses” in 1942 and have been often reprinted since; of “A Bear Hunt,” which appeared in Dr. Martino in 1934, and of a new story, “Race at Morning,” which carries on into old age the saga of Ike McCaslin, hunter. But, put together with new connective tissue–story, legend, poetry and memory–it is something new. It is Mr. Faulkner's fabulous Old Testament.

“It was his native land,” the old man meditates who was young in the first of the stories. “He had been born in it, and his bones would sleep in it … the hills along whose edge the plantation lay where he had been born and where old Sam Fathers, son of a Negro slave and a Chickasaw king, had trained and taught him how to use a gun with care and respect, in order to be worthy to enter the Big Woods when the time came.”