William Faulkner A To Z

This book is a monumental critical resource on William Faulkner -- the ideal companion to the Nobel Prize-winning author's life and work. The novels of Faulkner continue to fascinate and inspire. This compendium of critical thought -- including Robert Penn Warren, Graham Greene, Lionel Trilling, Malcolm Cowley, and George Orwell among others -- will aid fans and students alike in understanding the great author and giant of American literature. - Back cover.

As I Lay Dying; Light in August; The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; "The Bear"; and many others.

Presents critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism for The sound and the fury.

Despite all the studies devoted to William Faulkner, he continues to be variously perceived. Focussing on his fiction, this study of Faulkner's multifaceted literary life explores the distinctive blend of continuity and innvoation that characterizes his novels and looks at the extensive and varied reactions they have elicited.

William Faulkner examines the life and work of the American modernist whose experiments in style and form radically challenged not only the experience of time in narrative, but also conceptions of the American South, race, and the explosive fear of miscegenation. Beginning with the 1929 publication of The Sound and the Fury (his fourth novel), Faulkner produced a dazzling series of masterpieces in rapid order, including As I Lay Dying; Sanctuary; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses—novels and stories that alternately exhilarated and exasperated critics and left readers gasping to keep pace with his storytelling innovations. Transforming his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner created his own microcosm in which compassion and personal honor struggle to stand up to the violence, lust, and greed of the modern world. As prolific as Faulkner was, however, the career of this Nobel laureate was neither easy nor carefree. He was perpetually strapped for cash, burdened with supporting a large extended family, ambivalent toward his marriage, and vulnerable to alcoholism. Honoring both the man and the artist, this book examines how Faulkner strained to balance these pressures and pursue his literary vision with single-minded determination.

“Accessible . . . Engaging . . . May well be our fullest account to date of what Bleikasten calls Faulkner’s ‘energy for life’ and ‘will to write.’” —Theresa Towner, author of The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner Writing to American poet Malcolm Cowley in 1949, William Faulkner expressed his wish to be known only through his books—but his wish would not come true. He would go on to win the Nobel Prize for literature several months later, and when he died famous in 1962, his biographers immediately began to unveil and dissect the unhappy life of “the little man from Mississippi.” Despite the many works published about Faulkner, his life and career, it still remains a mystery how a poet of minor symbolist poems rooted in the history of the Deep South became one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Here, renowned critic André Bleikasten revisits Faulkner’s biography through the author’s literary imagination. Weaving together correspondence and archival research with the graceful literary analysis for which he is known, Bleikasten presents a multi-strand account of Faulkner’s life in writing. By carefully keeping both the biographical and imaginative lives in hand, Bleikasten teases out threads that carry the reader through the major events in Faulkner’s life, emphasizing those circumstances that mattered most to his writing: the weight of his multi-generational family history in the South; the formation of his oppositional temperament provoked by a resistance to Southern bourgeois propriety; his creative and sexual restlessness and uncertainty; his lifelong struggle with finances and alcohol; his paradoxical escape to the bondages of Hollywood; and his final bent toward self-destruction. This is the story of the man who wrote timeless works and lived in and through his novels.