At my birthday celebration last month, my sister gave me a book about the works of William Faulkner, FIGURES OF DIVISION (1986) by James A. Snead. This gift led me to google Snead's name, and discover a fascinating story. Snead was a promising scholar who died young -- at 35 years old (well, I'm old enough to consider that young). He died in 1989 -- apparently an AIDS related death. FIGURE OF DIVISION , an analysis of race in Faulkner's use of language, began its own life as Snead's doctoral dissertation. That earlier version got him his PhD in English from Cambridge, St John's College, under the direction of Colin McCabe. Here's a nice, I think representative, passage in the book: an appreciation of the character of Thomas Sutpen, "If one must read Sutpen as 'a version of the American dream,' a myth of rags-to-riches elevation, then clearly the American Dream of advancement deconstructs its own performance. Something is wrong if, even aft...