Dr. Faulkner's first encounter with black folk literature came in 1900, when he was a boy of ten, and a gifted storyteller named Simon Brown was hired to work on his widowed mother's farm in Society Hill, South Carolina. Simon Brown had been a slave in Virginia, and he enthralled young William with his true tales of slave life and his imaginative tales of talking animals. In fact, Simon Brown's folktales so impressed the mind of young Faulkner that he remembered all but a few and has faithfully recorded them in this book.

In 1967, Dr. Faulkner was commission to lecture on Afro-American folk literature at schools throughout Dade Country, Florida. For this work, he tape-recorded a number of Simon Brown's folktales, accompanied by brief talks about significant achievements by black people. The program was designed to improve the self-image of black students and to heighten the respect of white students for Blacks. The students responded enthusiastically, and this encouraged Dr. Faulkner to begin work on The Days When the Animals Talked.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DR. WILLIAM J. FAULKNER graduated from Springfield College, Springfiled, MA and received his doctorate in theology from the Chicago Theological Seminary of the University of Chicago. For nineteen years, he served with distinction as University Minister and Dean of Men at Fisk University, in Nashville. Dr. Faulkner continued his career as folklorist with the hope helping "to dignify the black storyteller and contribute to truer racial understanding." He died in 1987 at the age of 95.

CATEGORY
Fiction, History, Literature/AFRICAN AMERICAN