Courtesy today’s edition of Prufrock, a fine daily newsletter edited by Micah Mattix, comes this classic resignation letter from William Faulkner, onetime postmaster at the University of Mississippi:
[October, 1924]
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.
This, sir, is my resignation.
(Signed)
As the economist Walter Williams once observed, in the market system you don’t have to love your neighbors, you just have to serve them, even if they happen to take the form of an “itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.” That, apparently, was something that Faulkner just couldn’t tolerate.