THE civil rights issue was close to the top of the news almost every place one looked in the U.S. last week--in Washington, throughout the South, and amid the political sound and maneuver in San Francisco. How the U.S. reacted in the first week of the new law is reported and analyzed in THE NATION and THE LAW. To complete the perspective on this historic turning point in the relations between the races in the U.S., the editors of TIME decided they should present a deeper analysis of the traditions, emotions and psychological factors that lie at the roots of the problem and the progress. As the subject for that study, they chose the late great novelist William Faulkner, whose perceptive view from within the U.S. South illumined the crisis of conscience in race relations long before it worked its way out of the shadows.

This is Faulkner's second appearance on TIME'S cover. The first (Jan. 23, 1939) preceded his Nobel Prize by eleven years and was based on TIME'S judgment that he was the "central figure" in Southern literary life. Reaching back to that point and beyond, the raw material for this week's Faulkner story was considerably different from that for most cover stories. Although Senior Editor A. T. Baker, Writer Horace Judson and Researcher Martha McDowell had at hand some 70 pages of current reporting from TIME correspondents covering the civil rights front and a wealth of other background from TIME'S library, the bulk of their material came from Faulkner's writings. In ten days of preparing for the story, Judson read or reread from cover to cover some 13 volumes of Faulkner's works.

Judson is especially equipped for an assignment that calls for such concentrated reading. A native New Yorker who graduated from the University of Chicago (A.B.) at 17, Judson at 21 wrote The Techniques of Reading, a widely used textbook for college freshmen who want to learn how to read faster and with more comprehension. A onetime bureaucrat (as a civilian employee of the U.S. military in Berlin), reading teacher, book manuscript editor, advertising copywriter and account executive, Judson is now a mainstay of TIME'S BOOKS staff. As might be expected, he reads faster than most people, but he considers himself slow as a writer, spent some 70 hours at the typewriter on the Faulkner story.

For the cover portrait, Artist Robert Vickrey did his pen-and-ink drawing from photographs taken not long before Faulkner's death.

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