HATTIESBURG — A memorial service for Noel Polk will be held on Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Thad Cochran Building on the University of Southern Mississippi campus to honor Picayune’s native son, and the world’s pre-eminent William Faulkner scholar and lecturer, who died at his home in Jackson on Tuesday, surrounded by his family.

The family will greet friends from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. before the memorial service.

Polk, 69, was considered to be the “pre-eminent” Faulkner scholar and a world-renowned lecturer on Southern authors. His greatest expertise lay in the study of the works of William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.

His “Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work” is the standard reference text for Welty.

His work on editing Faulkner’s great novels, returning them to their original text, so they could be reissued by major publishing houses, such as the Library of America and Random House, and his other work, changed the foundation of Faulkner studies, which was the passion of his life.

In 2006, he won the Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award for his body of work. He studied Faulkner and Welty for 45 years with a brilliant intellect.

He wrote a reminiscence of growing up in Picayune for “The American Scholar” that revealed the complex nature of Southern culture. His writing style was similar to Faulkner’s because of decades of studying his work; periods were scarce.

Everybody wasn’t sitting on the front porch, sipping mint juleps; some places in the South, were, what he called, “outside of history.”

An essay, appropriately called “Living Outside History,” nailed the cultural melieu in which he grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in Picayune, Miss., a small Southern town where he was born on Feb. 23, 1943.

“It is as if Picayune had succeeded in hiding from the rest of Mississippi and the South. . .Picayune was not, is not, Southern in the same way that Natchez, Columbus, Oxford, Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, and the Mississippi Delta are. . .In Picayune I was outside of history, but the minute I stepped outside of Picayune, it began to lean in on me, undertaking a relentless pursuit to situate me outside of Picayune. . .still thinking of history as a series of facts and dates, not as a condition to be inherited. . .,” he wrote.

He then discovered Faulkner, which lit up his imagination. He went on to become the greatest living scholar on Faulkner, and invitations from all over the world came in for him to lecture. He once lectured to a Faulkner society in Tokyo. Other countries in which he held forth on Faulkner and other Southern writers were Russia, the European countries, Australia, South America and France. Those who saw him lecture say his style was inimitable.

Polk was an internationally recognized literary scholar and gifted professor, regarded by many as the pre-eminent Faulkner scholar of his generation. He was a central figure in Faulkner studies for 40 years.

He did the editorial work for the corrected editions of all of Faulkner’s novels, most recently co-editing a new edition of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” which finally fulfilled Faulkner’s plan to employ different colors of ink for sections of the opening chapter. He used the original typed manuscripts of the author for his revisions.

Some of his works were “Children of the Dark House; Text and Content in Faulkner,” “Requiem for a Nun: A Critical Study,” “Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition,” and he edited “Mississippi’s Piney Woods People,” an anthology of Mississippi writers, and the restored edition of Robert Penn Warren’s “All The Kings Men.”

He also wrote a memoir, “Outside the Southern Myth,” and recently published a collection of poems, “Walking Safari.”

After graduating from Picayune Memorial High School, he went to Mississippi College where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees and in 1970 earned a Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina.

Polk’s interpretive books and critical essays on Faulkner spanned decades and gave significant direction to Faulkner studies.

Polk was a professor at Southern Miss from 1977 to 2004, when he joined the faculty at Mississippi State University in Starkville. He was professor emeritus there and became the editor of the “Mississippi Quarterly.” He also helped found the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters to recognize artistic achievement in the state.

His family said that although he was a great scholar, he will always be remembered as “fun-loving, generous, kind, gracious and an encouraging” father. He lived life fully, loved to travel, loved his rose bushes, baseball games, his grandchildren and a gin-and-tonic.

Survivors include his children, Scott Polk of Orlando, Fla., Jennifer Polk Heidelberg of Jackson; three grandchildren, Sam, Emily and Francie Heidelberg, all of Jackson; brother Mickey Polk of Cleveland, Ohio; nephew Chad Polk of Terry and niece Holly Polk Kennedy of Hernando.

The family said that in lieu of flowers memorials may be given to the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Endowment Fund, P.O. Box 2346, Jackson MS 39225-2346.

(Dispatches from the Associated Press were used in compilation of this report.)