Shelby Foote on why Thomas Wolfe wasn’t William Faulkner

“Faulkner was a highly intelligent man. It sounds silly to say it. But people pay no attention to it.

“And a dumb fellow, a fellow who was pretty thick in the head, like Thomas Wolfe, he pays a big price for that lack of intelligence. It keeps him from being Faulkner.”

— Shelby Foote, quoted in “Parting the Curtains: Interviews with Southern Writers” by Dannye Romine Powell (1994)