William Faulkner Books

On top of everything, "Town" made him famous. He was one of the greatest novelists of the 20th Century and it all came from this book. I give it four stars, because the book wasn't the best during the time.

Found this in my library while doing research on Faulkner. A very good lit-crit before all the wierdness came into the field. Puts the novel and Faulkner's writing into perspective.

Faulkner used his creative skills to create a very compelling and realistic book... It appeals to the senses.

Conversations with William Faulkner is a wonderful little collection of essays about Faulkner by those who were lucky enough to have known him in all different capacities. His friends, neighbors, and publishers discuss Faulkner's life and works with additional input by a few of his students while a guest lecturer at Ole Miss. This book is a must have for any fan of Faulkner's work who would like to know the author more closely.

In the 1920s, William Faulkner was an unread and unappreciated author. All his books were out of print. Yet by 1950, he was revered by critics and winner of the Nobel Prize.

Schwartz traces how the development of New Criticism, a re-evaluation of his work (the difficulty of his style and depraved subject matter, once considered a negative, were now praised), and the publication of THE PORTABLE FAULKNER all went to make him the most respected writer of the 20th Century.

Only about half the book is about Faulkner directly, however; there is also a long chapter on the politics of the new criticism and the intellectual stand of the critics in the 1940s. Some might appreciate this diversion, and much of it is interesting, but for me it went on too long and took away from the main subject of the book. Readers interested in Faulkner's literary career will definitely this book valuable.

I wanted to make a correction for page 131, there is no George Herbert Lee who was lynched in 1961.
You mean Herbert Lee, my grandfather and father of nine, who was shot in 1961 by EW Hurst, but the witness to the shooting was Lewis Allen.

Faulkner's Mississippi

With excerpts from Sanctuary, The Faulkner Reader, As I Lay Dying, The Unvanquished, Light in August, Essays, Go Down, Moses; Absalom, Absalom!; and the exceptional writing style of editor/novelist Willie Morris, this work reveals the textures of Faulkner's Mississippi--cultural, linguistic, and social--making an exceptional commentary on southern life. Morris accomplishes the task of seizing and capturing the imagination of the reader. This image is heightened by the stark, often haunting photographs of Eggleston which combines the reality of Mississippi's landscape with an almost spiritual journey through Faulkner's mystical Yoknapatawpha County.

Morris, who served as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippe (Ole Miss), has allowed the reader to visualize a southern way of life which is non-existent in many Mississippi communities. From the smell of corn liquor, fried chicken and hush puppies to the sounds of choral music and the clamour of University students and fall football, the reader is gently nudged from one scene to yet another.

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha which extends from the Tallahatchie River to the north and the Yocona (patawpha) to the south, leaving its eastern and western boundaries to the readers imagination, encompasses the modern day town of Oxford, a center of intellectual achievement and southern hospitality. Named for the famous English University, this town possesses a remarkable and diverse culture. At it's epicenter stands the Lafayette County Courthouse: an imposing, white structure encircled by wizened oaks. From its deeply shaded benches old men relive past ventures or simply watch the city's comings and goings. A mile west of the Courthouse Square one encounters the youthful vigor of the University of Mississippi. This artfully landscaped campus has, during its history, weathered both Civil War and civil strife. All this and much more are revealed by Eggleston's photographic endeavours.

Although a little expensive, this work is a needed addition for any photographer, historian, or southern culture buff who dreams of a beauty and style which is nearly forgotten but which can be re-lived within the page of Faulkner's Mississippi.

by Dr. Carl Edwin Lindgren
COPYRIGHT 1991 Photographic Society of America, Inc.

I did not have high expectations for "Hemingway & Faulkner In Their Time" only because I thought I was pretty familiar with the story about these heavyweights who warily circled each other in the literary ring for years - only occasionally throwing a jab. I got it because for me Rovit and Waldhorn are the Daniel Boone & Davey Crockett of Hemingway studies who blazed the trail in search of Papa. (Weeks in 1962 with "Hemingway - A Collection of Critical Essays" and Rovit in 1963 with "Ernest Hemingway." This was way before the welcome deluge of biographies and literary studies.)

The key to the appeal of this volume is in the subtitle: "In Their Time." Rovit and Waldhorn structure the book around the personal and professional responses to Hemingway and Faulkner from a long list of contemporaries. Many of these contemporaries are still well known: Fitzgerald, Stein and Eliot. Many, alas, are not very visible anymore except as wraiths in the many accounts of the Lost Generation: Wyndham Lewis, Louise Bogan and Ramon Guthrie.

The Ramon Guthrie entry is a strong example of the joy to be found in reading "Hemingway and Faulkner." According to the book jacket Rovit and Waldhorn are both retired CCNY professors. Having hung up their coonskin caps, they are now Hemingway-trail-hardened Park Rangers with some great suggestions for less-traveled paths off the main trail. I am so grateful to Rovit and Waldhorn for sending me off on the path to Ramon Guthrie and his poem about Hemingway from "Maximum Security."

Who needs trail mix when you have a Cracker Jack of a book - with a treasure on almost every page?

Although I have strong disagreements with many of the conclusions of Jack Temple Kirby's 'Mockingbird Song,' and some objections to the approach he uses, it is still a wonderfully engaging and provocative inquiry into what went wrong in the blessed South. It doesn't hurt, either, that Kirby writes with wit and charm.

It is probably impossible to write an ecological history of 'the South.' It is too big and too various. Even Kirby admits its 'irreconcilable varieties.' The book is heavily skewed toward the flat, sandy and swampy coastal plain. The piedmont gets less attention, and the mountains less yet. The transMississippi South almost none.

Second, I have some doubts about using fictional remembrances to bolster what are supposed to be historical arguments; although, at the same time, Kirby is to be applauded for at least mentioning the undeservedly forgotten novelist and storyteller Julia Peterkin.

I have other objections, which will become clear in the summary of the narrative of the book.

This begins with the first people, who conquered the land with fire. This is as good a place as any to show in detail why 'Mockingbird Song' is simultaneously fascinating and infuriating.

The book is mostly, but not entirely, free of PC babble, but on one page Kirby writes how the noble red men 'didn't waste' anything, then a few pages later blandly writes how they exported woodpecker beaks as far as Colorado and Ontario. At the same time, he debunks the timeworn children's story about how Squanto taught the Pilgrims to bury a fish in each corn hill for fertilizer. In a land full of raccoons and similar varmints, that could have guaranteed a ruined garden. Peterkin made the same point in a story she wrote 75 years ago.

The truth is, the Indians disturbed the environment to the extent that their limited technology allowed, as all human groups have at all times -- except one, which we will get to later.

Then Kirby leads us through the European impact, in which the South became a provisioner for a world market. The main initial product was deerskins. The statistics here are problematic. Millions of skins were exported, but the South (and Midwest) ought to have been able to support that level of harvest. Kirby does not discuss why the deer population crashed. Probably it is the indiscriminate taking of does.

Farming, logging and, in some places, mining ravaged the natural South, as did the trampling Eurasian livestock and crowding weeds. Queen Anne's lace, probably the characteristic plant of the southern summer, is an import.

Unlike Donald Edward Davis in his more geographically limited 'Where There Are Mountains,' Kirby makes little of the blight that eliminated the chestnut from the southern mountains. It is surprising, though, that when Kirby gets to industrial pollution, he does not use the example of the copper smelter at Ducktown, Tenn. Davis also underplays this, still the most graphic instance of industrial pollution anywhere in the South. Miles and miles of east Tennessee were denuded of even a single green leaf. This was the real acid rain.

Ecological change becomes complexly intertwined with slavery and plantation agriculture, and this section of the book was, to me, the most interesting. Kirby contends that rural southerners treated the land as a commons. It was not, as in Europe, legally so. All the real property was assigned to someone. Kirby does not make this distinction, which I think an important one.

For Kirby, the signature tree loss was not the chestnut or the cypress but the longleaf pine, eliminated by the turpentiners and kept from recovering by the pulp industry.

In this long section, he brings in the importance of hunting, but in a strange way. There are pages and pages about hunting devil fish (manta rays), although the number of devil fish hunters can be counted on the thumbs of two hands. Not a line about coons, little about dogs, little about horses, nothing about quarterhorses.

To me, the characteristic animal of the South is the chigger. Chiggers are absent, too.

The discussion of the closure of the free range and the criminalization of forest arson -- which had been practiced by everybody -- threw new light on those topics for me.

As he gets closer to the present day, Kirby's sharpest ire is reserved for suburbia, green lawns and sprawl. It is hard to worry about sprawl in an area with as much acreage as Europe and only one fourth as many people. And since arable peaked in 1860 in the South, there's no economic demand for the land to be used for anything else.

Here is where we meet the one group of people in history who do not alter the environment as much as they can: Once people become rich enough and secure enough in their food supply to afford it, they can establish nature reserves. Kirby seems ambivalent about these, and would have preferred, apparently, that the South had evolved as a land of small farms.

He cites the North Carolina tenant farmer's daughter, Linda Flowers, who in her memoir, 'Throwed Away,' writes of the displacement of the Southern small farmer. Actually, most small farmers couldn't wait to give up what Hank Williams memorably described as resurveying the same 40 acres again and again over the hindquarters of a mule. Flowers herself could have continued to farm if she had been willing to exist on the $15 a week her parents made; but, unsurprisingly, she preferred to work as a college teacher. (See my extended discussion of eastern N.C. tenantry in my Amazon review of 'Throwed Away.')

Kirby cites an instance of genuine environmental disaster in the South that, to me, illustrates just what is wrong with his and Flowers' regrets. When a horridly poisonous dinoflagellate, Pfiesteria piscicida, broke out in eastern waters, the identification was made by a woman aquatic biologist at North Carolina State University. As recently as 1962, there were no women (and no black people, either) at State, as students or teachers. If the commons and the old lifeways had to be extinguished to bring this about, then they were well lost.

Kirby, in one of his thought-provoking excursions, talks about the significance of bricks and observes that in the dying era of premodern agriculture in the South, some working class people managed to live in brick houses, including in eastern North Carolina. So they did, although the Flowers family was not among them; and in northwest Georgia, the schoolhouses were built of solid marble. But I am a Southerner, too, though I no longer live there, and the characteristic houses I remember were tarpaper shacks with backhouses. The comfortably middle class, as Kirby came from, may regret the changes in the 21st century South. Most Southerners embrace them.

Although Kirby's outlook on change is disagreeable to me, his writings are valuable and deserve attention from anyone interested in the past and future of the South. After finishing 'Mockingbird Song,' I immediately ordered his earlier books 'Poquosin' and 'Rural Worlds Lost.'

Lastly, Kirby and I both love the South, and I agree completely that 'Barbecue . . . is as much as anything the unifying substance of that pesky abstraction, the South.' But we disagree on what barbecue is. Kirby is a Virginian and partial to North Carolina barbecue, seasoned only with vinegar; while I am a Tennesseean and partial to a sauce of molasses, tomatoes and spices. It's no wonder our interpretations of the South are so different.

I'm an insatiable reader who would only buy book notes such as these for the fun of correcting them with a red marker; however this book by Faulkner is an exercise in trendy techniqe. So if you're not totally jiggy with the stream-of-consciousness method that Joyce (the master) and Woolfe were so enamored with, this will be the clue book that might help you figure out just what it is Bill was trying to say. Good Luck.