In Ledgers of History, Wolff uncovers a little-known friendship of William Faulkner's and and reveals startling sources of inspiration for Faulkners most famous works. The book includes inverviews with Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, who as a child would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner---childhood friends---swapped stories. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscos great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, a pre-Civil War era plantation owner in Mississippi. Wolff shows how the diary is the source for some of the most important material in several of his greatest works, including Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Ledgers of History offers a compelling portrait of the future Nobel laureate near the midpoint of his legendary career and also charts a significant discovery that will inevitably lead to revisions in historical and critical scholarship on Faulkner and his writings.