On the correctness of "We read Faulkner's work and learned that he...," 
the question is one of the status of what's been called the Possessive 
Antecedent Prohibition. It turns out that this putative rule of grammar 
goes back only a little over six decades. The earliest appearance of it 
in a grammar treatise is in the early 1940s, but from that source it 
appears to have spread like kudzu and become as certain as the 
eighty-year-older prohibition on splitting infinitives. Arnold Zwicky 
has done extensive research on the PAP that you can find by googling 
either Zwicky or Possessive Antecedent Prohibition. One of many places 
to start is 
http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2009/10/11/just-in-nyt-violates-pap/.

This is just to you, not the group. I appreciate your calling Zwicky's 
work to my attention. I had never known there was a name for the 
problem, and I was certainly not aware of the interesting comments by 
Zwicky and others.
Happy New Year,
Gerald

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