On this day in 1924, William Faulkner resigned from his job as postmaster at Ole Miss.

Before he took the job, he had dropped out of Ole Miss twice, lived in Greenwich Village, worked at a bookstore, and had come to the point where he had to accept the postmaster job that a friend had pulled strings for him to get. He was a uniquely terrible postmaster, opening and closing the post office when he felt like it, reading other people's magazines, throwing away mail he felt was unimportant, and ignoring patrons while he played cards with his friends or wrote deathless prose in the back room.

When presented with a written request that he acknowledge within five days his failings, detailed at length in the letter, and straighten up his act, he waited a few weeks and responded thusly:

"As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation."

In 1987, the US Post Office issued a stamp bearing his likeness. I guess all was forgiven.

Gotta love a guy like that.

quote:

Originally posted by CHAS:
Gotta love a guy like that.

As long as he’s not *your* postmaster.

I would forgive the terrible postmastering, if I could have been one of the cardplaying cronies.

That way, I could have waited until he passed out drunk, rifled through the mail and found mine, gone out to the desk and taken care of the mailing needs of the people waiting there, then gone back and read the deathless prose while he slept.

Maybe I could have picked up some pointers.

I used to put all the mail in people's mailboxes in my college dorm. And I think I was guilty of reading a lot of magazines LOL.

Great story.