Download or read book The Saddest Words William Faulkner s Civil War written by Michael Gorra and published by Liveright Publishing. This book was released on 2020-08-25 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

Download or read book A Talk with William Faulkner written by Russell Warren Howe and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 3 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Bear written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaac McCaslin is obsessed with hunting down Old Ben, a mythical bear that wreaks havoc on the forest. After this feat is accomplished, Isaac struggles with his relationship to nature and to the land, which is complicated when he inherits a large plantation in Yoknapatawapha County. “The Bear” is included in William Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Download or read book Conversations with William Faulkner written by M. Thomas Inge and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 1999 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When a writer passes through the wall of oblivion, he will even then stop long enough to write something on the wall, like 'Kilroy was here.'" William Faulkner was not keen on giving interviews. More often than not, he refused, as when he wrote an aspiring interviewer in 1950, "Sorry but no. Am violently opposed to interviews and publicity." Yet during the course of his prolific writing career, the truth is that he submitted to the ordeal on numerous occasions in the United States and abroad. Although three earlier volumes were thought to have gathered most of Faulkner's interviews, continued research has turned up many more. Ranging from 1916, when he was a shabbily dressed young Bohemian poet to the last year of his life when he was putting finishing touches on his final novel The Reivers, they are collected here for the first time. Many of these articles and essays provide descriptions of Faulkner, his home, and his daily world. They report not only on the things that he said but on the attitudes and poses he adopted. Some capture him making up tall tales about himself, several of which gained credibility and became a part of the Faulkner mythology. Included too are the interviews from Faulkner at West Point. Taken together, this material provides a revealing and lively portrait of a Nobel Prize winner that many acclaim as the century's greatest writer. M. Thomas Inge, the Robert Emory Blackwell Professor of English and Humanities at Randolph- Macon College, is the author or editor of more than fifty books in American literature and in American popular culture.

Download or read book That Evening Sun written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quentin Compson narrates the story of his family’s African-American washerwoman, Nancy, who fears that her husband will murder her because she is pregnant with a white-man’s child. The events in the story are witnessed by a young Quentin and his two siblings, Caddy and Jason, who do not fully understand the adult world of race and class conflict that they are privy to. Although primarily known for his novels, William Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Download or read book Ledgers of History written by Sally Wolff and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his familyb2ss ancestral home in Holly Springs, Mississippi, thirty miles north of Oxford. In the conversations with Wolff, he recalls that as a boy he would sit and listen as his father and Faulkner sat on the gallery and talked about whatever came to mind. Francisco frequently told stories to Faulkner, many of them oft-repeated, about his family and community, which dated to antebellum times. Some of these stories, Wolff shows, found their way into Faulknerb2ss fiction. Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Franciscob2ss great-great-grandfather Francis Terry Leak, who owned extensive plantation lands in northern Mississippi before the Civil War. Some parts of the diary recount incidents in Leakb2ss life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home.

Download or read book Fiction s Inexhaustible Voice written by Stephen M. Ross and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner recognized voice as one of the most distinctive and powerful elements in fiction when he delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, describing the last sound at the end of the world as man's "puny inexhaustible voice, still talking." As a testimonial of an artist's faith in his art, the speech raised the value of voice to its highest reach for man, as "one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Stephen Ross explores the nature of voice in William Faulkner's fiction by examining the various modes of speech and writing that his texts employ. Beginning with the proposition that voice is deeply involved in the experience of reading Faulkner, Ross uses theoretically grounded notions of voice to propose new ways of explaining how Faulkner's novels and stories express meaning, showing how Faulkner used the affective power of voice to induce the reader to forget the silent and originless nature of written fiction. Ross departs from previous Faulkner criticism by proceeding not text-by-text or chronologically but by construction a workable taxonomy which defines the types of voice in Faulkner's fiction: phenomenal voice, a depicted event or object within the represented fictional world; mimetic voice, the illusion that a person is speaking; psychic voice, one heard only in the mind and overheard only through fiction's omniscience; and oratorical voice, an overtly intertextual voice which derives from a discursive practice--Southern oratory--recognizable outside the boundaries of any Faulkner text and identifiable as part of Faulkner's biographical and regional heritage. In Faulkner's own experience, listening was important. As he once confided to Malcolm Cowley, "I listen to the voices, and when I put down what the voices say, it's right." In Fiction's Inexhaustible Voice, Ross conducts a careful analysis of this fundamental source of power in Faulkner's fiction, concluding that the preponderance of voice imagery, represented talking, verbalized thought, and oratorical rhetoric and posturing makes the novels and stories fundamentally vocal. They derive their energy from the play of voices on the imaginative field of written language.

Download or read book Light in August written by William Faulkner and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Light in August" by William Faulkner. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Download or read book William Faulkner written by William Faulkner and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book William Faulkner and Southern History written by Joel Williamson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1995-12-14 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's great novelists, William Faulkner was a writer deeply rooted in the American South. In works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner drew powerfully on Southern themes, attitudes, and atmosphere to create his own world and place--the mythical Yoknapatawpha County--peopled with quintessential Southerners such as the Compsons, Sartorises, Snopes, and McCaslins. Indeed, to a degree perhaps unmatched by any other major twentieth-century novelist, Faulkner remained at home and explored his own region--the history and culture and people of the South. Now, in William Faulkner and Southern History, one of America's most acclaimed historians of the South, Joel Williamson, weaves together a perceptive biography of Faulkner himself, an astute analysis of his works, and a revealing history of Faulkner's ancestors in Mississippi--a family history that becomes, in Williamson's skilled hands, a vivid portrait of Southern culture itself. Williamson provides an insightful look at Faulkner's ancestors, a group sketch so brilliant that the family comes alive almost as vividly as in Faulkner's own fiction. Indeed, his ancestors often outstrip his characters in their colorful and bizarre nature. Williamson has made several discoveries: the Falkners (William was the first to spell it "Faulkner") were not planter, slaveholding "aristocrats"; Confederate Colonel Falkner was not an unalloyed hero, and he probably sired, protected, and educated a mulatto daughter who married into America's mulatto elite; Faulkner's maternal grandfather Charlie Butler stole the town's money and disappeared in the winter of 1887-1888, never to return. Equally important, Williamson uses these stories to underscore themes of race, class, economics, politics, religion, sex and violence, idealism and Romanticism--"the rainbow of elements in human culture"--that reappear in Faulkner's work. He also shows that, while Faulkner's ancestors were no ordinary people, and while he sometimes flashed a curious pride in them, Faulkner came to embrace a pervasive sense of shame concerning both his family and his culture. This he wove into his writing, especially about sex, race, class, and violence, psychic and otherwise. William Faulkner and Southern History represents an unprecedented publishing event--an eminent historian writing on a major literary figure. By revealing the deep history behind the art of the South's most celebrated writer, Williamson evokes new insights and deeper understanding, providing anyone familiar with Faulkner's great novels with a host of connections between his work, his life, and his ancestry.

Download or read book Talking About William Faulkner written by Sally Wolff and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s and 1980s, Sally Wolff and Floyd C. Watkins, both of Emory University, took students of southern literature to Lafayette County, Mississippi, to explore the region where William Faulkner lived. They visited Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi; trekked around the countryside; and met people who were the prototypes for some of his characters. During these excursions, they discovered firsthand how profoundly Faulkner’s family, community, and region imprinted themselves on his imagination and then both shaped and enriched his work. Their primary guide was Jimmy Faulkner, who was once described by his famous uncle as “the only person who likes me for what I am.” Like his uncle, Jimmy is a born storyteller, and his recollections provide profound as well as intimate details about Faulkner as author, father, member of the unusual Faulkner clan, and resident of the model for what may be the most famous county in American literature. In these interviews, and in the forty-three splendid black-and-white photographs that accompany them, we move through Faulkner’s home territory and encounter the sources of his sense of place and its past: antebellum Rowan Oak, with its scuppernong vines and outside kitchen; old plantation homes and dogtrot houses; narrow one-lane bridges and creeks with Indian names; country churches and cemeteries. Jimmy’s comments often link specific sites with particular episodes or settings in Faulkner’s works, and his humorous stories sometimes mingle fact with fiction. Two colorful local personalities who knew Faulkner—Pearle Galloway, proprietor of a general store near Oxford for over thirty years, and Motee Daniel, owner of various enterprises, including a roadhouse, a general store, and a bootlegging operation—also tell tales about him. Galloway and Daniel provide, in turn, fascinating glimpses of the kind of people who intrigued Faulkner and about whom he wrote. While his work was most certainly influenced by his surroundings, Faulkner, through his stories and novels, likewise transformed the memories, perceptions, and interpretations of his family, his community, and his readers. Talking About William Faulkner deepens our knowledge of Faulkner’s everyday life and our understanding of the world in which he lived and of which he wrote.

Download or read book Essays Speeches Public Letters written by William Faulkner and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential collection of William Faulkner’s mature nonfiction work, updated, with an abundance of new material. This unique volume includes Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (in which he suggests that Hemingway has found God), and newly collected gems, such as the acerbic essay “On Criticism” and the beguiling “Note on A Fable.” It also contains eloquently opinionated public letters on everything from race relations and the nature of fiction to wild-squirrel hunting on his property. This is the most comprehensive collection of Faulkner’s brilliant non-fiction work, and a rare look into the life of an American master.

Download or read book The Life of William Faulkner written by Carl Rollyson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 603 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second and concluding volume of Carl Rollyson’s ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts—a symptom of the South’s faded fortunes—and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund. And so he turns to the classic temptation for financially struggling writers—Hollywood. Thus begins roughly a decade of shuttling between his home and family in Mississippi—lifeblood of his art—and the backlots of the Golden Age film industry. Through Faulkner’s Hollywood years, Rollyson introduces such personalities as Humphrey Bogart and Faulkner’s long-time collaborator Howard Hawks, while telling the stories behind films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. At the same time, he chronicles with great insight Faulkner's rapidly crumbling though somehow resilient marriage and his numerous extramarital affairs--including his deeply felt, if ultimately doomed, relationship with Meta Carpenter. (In his grief over their breakup, Faulkner—a dipsomaniac capable of ferocious alcoholic binges—received third-degree burns when he passed out on a hotel-room radiator.) Where most biographers and critics dismiss Faulkner’s film work as at best a necessary evil, at worst a tragic waste of his peak creative years, Rollyson approaches this period as a valuable window on his artistry. He reveals a fascinating, previously unappreciated cross-pollination between Faulkner’s film and literary work, elements from his fiction appearing in his screenplays and his film collaborations influencing his later novels—fundamentally changing the character of late-career works such as the Snopes trilogy. Rollyson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the composition of Absalom, Absalom!, widely considered Faulkner’s masterpiece, as well as the film adaptation he authored—unproduced and never published— Revolt in the Earth. He reveals how Faulkner wrestled with the legacy of the South—both its history and its dizzying racial contradictions—and turned it into powerful art in works such as Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust. Volume 2 of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated "writer's writer" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon. In his famous Nobel speech, Faulkner said what inspired him was the human ability to prevail. In the end, this beautifully wrought life shows how Faulkner, the man and the artist, embodies this remarkable capacity to endure and prevail.

Download or read book Becoming Faulkner written by Philip Weinstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-20 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the twentieth century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism. In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein--a leading authority on the great novelist--targets Faulkner's embattled sense of self as central to both his life and his work. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and racial division--take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. Becoming Faulkner joins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and southern heritage--form a pattern that played out over the course of his entire life. At the same time, these incidents take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. It was in meditating on his failures, his own unreadiness, Weinstein argues, that Faulkner came up with his singular language, one that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. His fruitless striving catapulted American literature to a new level of sophistication. Narrating the events that comprised Faulkner's life, biographers have long struggled to depict his personal complexity, the paradoxes that shaped his decisions and dogged his relationships. But without a consideration of the writing as well, the troubles in the life fail to reveal their deeper resonance. By skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events, Weinstein achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that animate his life and shadows that complicate his work. Becoming Faulkner thus conjoins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.

Download or read book Red Leaves written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Chief Issetibbeha dies, custom requires that the Chickasaw leader’s worldly possessions be buried with him. This includes his servant, who makes a desperate bid for his life in this early William Faulkner short story. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Download or read book Essays Speeches Public Letters written by William Faulkner and published by New York : Random House. This book was released on 1966 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An essential collection of William Faulkner's mature nonfiction work, updated, with an abundance of new material. This unique volume includes Faulkner's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a review of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea (in which he suggests that Hemingway has found God), and newly collected gems, such as the acerbic essay "On Criticism" and the beguiling "Note on A Fable." It also contains eloquently opinionated public letters on everything from race relations and the nature of fiction to wild-squirrel hunting on his property. This is the most comprehensive collection of Faulkner's brilliant non-fiction work, and a rare look into the life of an American master.

Download or read book The Wishing Tree written by William Faulkner and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strange boy with red hair leads a birthday-girl and her companions on a hunt for the wishing tree which brings them many suprising and magical adventures.