Pay Homage at Faulkner's Grave

Perhaps the most decorous homage a Faulknerphile can pay is a visit to his grave, where the standard rite is to drink a swig of bourbon and leave the bottle as a gift. On our visit, we find the last third of a fifth of Maker’s Mark and an empty pint of Jack Daniel’s, Faulkner’s whiskey of choice. His marker is modest by any means but particularly compared to the 30-foot Italian obelisk that towers over his mother’s grave in the family plot up the hill. And while he wrote an elegiac inscription for his brother's headstone, his own bears simply his name and dates, and a generic phrase with—perfectly—an errant apostrophe:

Belove’d
Go with God