Collected Stories of William Faulkner, published in 1950 and awarded the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951, is more than an arbitrarily arranged selection of representative stories. Indeed, it is remarkably similar in form and theme to many of Faulkner's novels, especially Go Down, Moses, and can profitably be read as a unified work.Like Go Down, Moses, As I Lay Dying, Light in August and other Faulkner novels, Collected Stories is structured around a center, in this case a theme: the relationship between man and his environment. The six chapters of Collected Stories and the stories within each chapter are arranged in a "counterpointed" fashion; together, they offer myriad ways of looking at the central theme.Each chapter of the work is unified thematically, and each ultimately has relevance to the theme of man in relationship to his environment. "The Country" is set in ruralYoknapatawpha County and concerns the idea of self-assertion.