If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
novel by William Faulkner
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is a novel by the American author William Faulkner published in 1939. The novel was originally published under the title The Wild Palms, which is the title of one of the two interwoven stories. This title was chosen by the publishers, Random House, over the objections of Faulkner's choice of a title. Subsequent editions have since been printed under the title If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (1990, following the "corrected text" and format of Noel Polk), and since 2003 it is now usually referred to by both names, with the newer title following the historically first published title and in brackets, to avoid confusion: The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem].
Like four other Faulkner novels (Soldiers' Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon and A Fable), the novel is not set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County.
Synopsis
The book consists of two different stories, told in non-linear fashion in alternating chapters, which contain both parallels and contrasts.
Wild Palms starts in New Orleans in 1937 with Harry, an impoverished and virginal intern finishing his training in a hospital. At a party he meets Charlotte, who abandons her husband and two children to run away with him.
With little money and few employment prospects, they drift through Chicago to a cabin in Wisconsin and then a mine in Utah. There Charlotte falls pregnant and they decide to go to the Mississippi coast.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem” as novel by William Faulkner. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as novel by William Faulkner. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2559408. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1939, 1990, 2003 and 1937.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.