Like a Toll of the Heavenly Bells

The author examines William Faulkner’s early “New Orleans Sketches” (1925), arguing these prose poems and short stories – grounded in biblical motifs and influenced by Charles Baudelaire, James Joyce, and Sherwood Anderson – were pivotal to his turn from poetry to prose. Drawing on publication history and comparative literary analysis, the study traces how the sketches renewed Faulkner’s confidence, shaped his lyrical prose, and prefigured the regional imagination of Yoknapatawpha County. It situates New Orleans as a formative creative locus that helped Faulkner abandon formal verse for hybrid prose forms, thereby inaugurating the stylistic trajectory that secured his place in American letters.