jefferson, yoknapatawpha co., Mississippi. Area, 2400 Square Miles. Population, Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. william faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor.

This mock “gazetteer” entry is Faulkner’s tongue-in-cheek self-identification with Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional Mississippi setting that anchors most of his major novels and stories. By presenting it like a statistical directory—complete with area and racial population figures—Faulkner mimics the authoritative language of official records while reminding readers that the county is an invented world. The tag “Sole Owner & Proprietor” underscores his role as its creator and controlling intelligence, and it also hints at the way his imaginative territory draws heavily on (and critiques) the social realities of the historical Deep South, especially its racial demographics and power structures.

The quotation blends documentary authority with irony. By adopting the tone of an official statistical description, Faulkner suggests that fiction can rival history in explanatory power: Yoknapatawpha is “made up,” yet it is rendered with the specificity of a real county. The boast “Sole Owner & Proprietor” is both comic and revealing—an admission that the county’s laws, memories, and tragedies are subject to the writer’s design, even as they mirror forces (race, class, inheritance, violence) that exceed any individual’s control. The demographic breakdown foregrounds the centrality of race to the county’s social order, hinting that the imaginative “ownership” of place is inseparable from the South’s contested histories of ownership and power.