William Faulkner (1897-1962), one of the most prominent American prose writers of the 20th century, was born in New Albany, Mississippi, to descendants of planters ruined after the victory of the North in the Civil War. Subsequently, the writer spent most of his life in the city of Oxford (in the same state). In his numerous novels and short stories, he develops a characteristic theme of the American South, starting with the slave and post-reform years and up to modern times. Faulkner is inclined to a formal experiment, and this for a long time limited his popularity. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1950. The story "Old Man" (in English "Old Man" - "Old Man"; the so-called Mississippi River in American folklore) was published in 1939. In the book The Wild Palms (D.T.) ........ Being quite an independent work, it is printed “crosswise” with “Wild palms”, a story of about the same volume (the chapter from one story is followed by a chapter from the other, and so on to the end) ............... The degree of connectedness of the two stories is the subject of controversy among American specialists in Faulkner’s work . [DT ) The title of the book is “If I Don’t Forget You, O Jerusalem” (Psalm 136:5). Published in Russian for the first time.