Now, your first pick is As I Lay Dying, Faulkner’s fifth novel. Well said, and that’s a fascinating connection you make between Faulkner and Joyce. That defense of the South and of Mississippi specifically can, of course, be found in the Yoknapatawpha fiction, his aforementioned postage stamp like Joyce’s Dublin, Faulkner takes a geographical space and historical moment that is profoundly personal to him and makes that space and time universal, putting what he calls “the agony and sweat of the human spirit” into terms we can all understand. There is a thing known whimsically as the New South to be sure, but it is not the south.” So, there is a tension between Faulkner recognizing what scholars have termed the ‘sins’ of southern history while also, like southern poets and artists such as Allan Tate or Robert Penn Warren, feeling a need to defend the South. More pointedly, in his 1933 introduction to The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner declares that “the South…is dead, killed by the Civil War. “Difficulty is part of his authorial aesthetic-he wants you to work at understanding his novels” On the other hand, you have a novel like The Unvanquished, which takes place in the last days of the Civil War, and has always struck me as being an overt defense, if ultimately a lamentation, of the Old South and its losses during the War. On the one hand, works like “A Rose for Emily” or Absalom, Absalom! are useful for readers looking for explicit critiques of the notion of the Old South and all that the antebellum aristocracy stood for, especially slavery and the subjugation of women. Can you touch on the presence of the Old South in his fiction, along with the relationship between historical geography and Faulkner’s own conceptualization of the South?įaulkner felt a profound ambivalence towards the idea of the Old South, I think. The Old South is inextricably connected to Faulkner and his work. With Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner wanted to create what he called his “little postage stamp of native soil” where he could tell the stories of a fictional series of families-the Sartorises, the Compsons, the Snopes, to name only three of many examples-and their struggle to negotiate the Old South’s often agonistic transition to modernity. He authored 19 novels, including The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 (you can read his acceptance speech here).įaulkner’s novels are, with a few exceptions, set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictionalized version of Lafayette County, Mississippi.

William Faulkner was an author from Mississippi born in 1897, and he became one of the towering figures of twentieth century literature, alongside figures such as Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.

Who was William Faulkner, and why is it important to read his books today?

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

William Faulkner by Frederick R. Karl