William Faulkner Books

...And these lectures, delivered initially to a class Marius taught at Harvard, present a fascinating take on one of the great writers of the American South.

Marius concludes his fine collection of essays on Faulkner by asserting, "In 1942 [Faulkner] could look back on sixteen years of the most productive greatness in American literary history." If you consider that four of the thirteen novels authored in this period -- THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING, LIGHT IN AUGUST, and ABSALOM! ABSALOM! -- would be on anyone's list of best 100 American novels of all time or best English-language novels of the 20th century, it is indeed an awesome accomplishment. If you consider the hardship Faulkner worked under during this period (always close to bankruptcy, doing degrading script work in Hollywood, enduring a bad marriage, surviving the deaths of a daughter and brother, and manifesting what was surely clinical alcoholism), the achievement is even more awesome.

The sense of the greatness of Faulkner's mind pervades Marius's analyses of the texts. In spite of Faulkner's great experimentalism, Marius always assumes the author knew what he was doing and that Faulkner's ultimate choices (about point of view, character, narration, dialect, vocabulary choice) can be trusted as essential to the great storyteller's craft and intentions. The novels FLAGS IN THE DUST, THE WILD PALMS and GO DOWN, MOSES are good examples of times when editorial intervention did more harm than good. Marius also does a good job of sorting out the influences that are key to understanding and appreciating Faulkner: Darwin, Freud, Frazer, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust; and he gives teasing insights into the rivalry between Faulkner and Hemingway. (For instance, Hemingway often seems coy on sexual matters that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in mainstream fiction today; this is mostly because of the prudishness of his editor at Scribners', Max Perkins. Faulkner's freedom from such censorship stirred Hemingway's envy; Hemingway's runaway sales stirred Faulkner's.) In addition to the chapters on Faulkner's thirteen first novels, the book includes insightful essays on "Faulkner and Blacks: The Endemic Problem of Race and Racism in American Society" and "Faulkner an the Mythological World." Understood as class lectures, this book is best read from beginning to end, as much in the later chapters assumes the reader is familiar with concepts introduced earlier. Marius is clearly a gifted teacher--one who coaxes as well as instructs--and I would have loved to have sat in his class. I would also love to know what he thought of Faulkner's later work, the novels that most critics consider inferior but which to me still show sparks of greatness (and in some cases are as easy to read as Hemingway or any other bestselling author.)

Richard Marius (1933-1999) was the author of four novels: The Coming of Rain (1969), Bound for the Promised Land (1976), After the War (1992), and An Affair of Honor, published posthumously. He also wrote two works of non-fiction: Thomas More: A Biography (1984) and Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (1999).

Reading Faulkner is a collection of delightful lectures delivered by Marius at Harvard Univ. in 1996 and 1997. These lectures are introductions to Faulkner's first 13 novels: Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses.

What a remarkable period of creativity Faulkner enjoyed, stretching from his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926) to the last of his great novels, Go Down, Moses (1942). "In 1942," Marius comments, "[Faulkner] could look back on sixteen years of the most productive greatness in American literary history."

Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Miss. (one can visit there his beloved home, Rowan Oak), which was the prototype of the town of Jefferson, in mythical Yoknapatawpha County. It was a narrow, circumscribed world, full of various passions and prejudices, a world of conflicting issues of sex, class, and race. But out of this particular time and place Faulkner created a body of literature that has universal relevance and timeless appeal. The characters created by his fertile imagination reveal the human condition and, as Shakespeare put it, throws up the mirror of nature to ourselves. His work reveals "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."

"[I] discovered," wrote Faulkner, "that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own."

Marius points out various influences on the development of Faulkner's dark and tragic art: Greek and Roman mythology, especially as chronicled in Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough;the plays of Shakespeare (whom he loved); and the writings of depth psychologists.

According to Marius, however, the two greatest influences on Faulkner were the poetry of T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," "The Waste Land" and so forth) and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin.

"I think a strong case can be made," writes Marius, "for Faulkner as someone deeply interested in the implications of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwinism is inherently pessimistic. Darwin did not believe in God and did not believe in any ultimate purpose to the life of the individual, the nation, or the human race."

In another place, Marius writes, "Darwin held that human beings are a higher form of animal--higher only in that our brains give us a superior capacity to survive. I believe it is demonstrable from the text that Faulkner was enormously influenced by the teaching of Charles Darwin, that human beings evolved from lower forms of life, and that the most important feature of any species is that it adapt itself sufficiently to its environment to survive....I see a Darwinian impulse that I find constant in Faulkner from the beginning."

Faulkner is often difficult to "read," that is, to understand. Like James Joyce's Ulysses, many of his works exhibit a stream-of-consciousness dislocation of time. Marius: "Faulkner plays with time, happy to break up, indeed to shatter the traditional idea of chronology in the novel, a tradition where we have a linear progression of plot with occasional clearly marked flashbacks." There is a curious interplay of consciousness and memory in Faulkner that often disorients and confuses the reader.

Like Shakespeare, Faulkner features characters who are puzzling mixtures of good and evil, light and darkness. Nor does Faulkner give us much help in understanding his characters. Again like Shakespeare, he maintains a distance or detachment from them, letting their deeds speak for them and putting the burden of interpretation of the readers.

A persistent theme in Faulkner's novels is the hypocrisy of those who attempt, at all costs, to keep up appearances, which to them is more important than reality. So long as a code or custom is ostensibly upheld and honored, the true state of affairs is relatively unimportant. Thus, incest may be winked at while miscegenation may become a capital offense (often by lynching). One doubts that such an obsession with appearances is peculiar to the South, but Faulkner certainly seems to think that such hypocrisy is an endemic Southern problem.

Faulkner's world is a tragic world, and his art is a tragic art. Death is the end of life, and life is filled with pride, prejudice, lust, greed, deceit, hypocrisy, and violence. One begins to wonder if Darwin is correct in saying that human beings are higher than the other animals. Perhaps labeling some human act as "bestial" is a vile and vicious slander of the beasts.

Reading Faulkner is so rewarding that one despairs of doing it justice in a review. It inspires one to reread Faulkner's novels and short stories, for such a rereading, using Marius' excellent literary compass will doubtless help one see things missed on first reading.

i'v used this book for direction in taking the clep in english lit and the gre in lit in english. obviously it isn't comprehensive, just skims, but covers the pertinent dates, figures, and works to get you going. i recommend the Masterplots series for in-depth essays on these topics -- much better than those cliff notes which bore me.

I am currently studying to take the Oklahoma Teacher's Certification Exam in English. This book has really helped me. I don't know what I would have done without it!!

When I began studying, I only had four weeks to study. Right now, I still have two weeks left, and I am actually starting to understand British/English literature. Please keep in mind; I have only had one literature class in my life, and I took it over 14 years ago. Basically, I was literature illiterate. This book has really help me a lot.

However, I must admit that I have done a lot of additional research. [...]

I also bought the American Literature EZ 101 because the exam will cover both areas. That book is equally as excellent as this one. By using those two books, by comitting to some serious study time, and by using wikipedia when I got stuck, I feel literate!!

I truly believe that this book is a good resource for self-study--if you're willing to study!! It WILL NOT give you every little detail; it is designed as a study guide to help you get through a college class where you actually have a teacher to help when you get "stuck". On the other hand, if you're looking for a study guide, I don't think you can beat it. It is excellent!!

This is a great book. I enjoy hours of reading it. All of my childhood memories of growing up in Little Rock come back.

Being forced out of Arkansas to California to complete my education after Governor Faubus closed the schools, didn't dampen my view of the South.

I plan to buy all of the new subjects that have just been published by these publishers.

This book is a wonderful, interesting look of the south and it's history and cultures.

Diane Roberts attempts to tackle the enormous topic of Faulkner's female characters. Roberts divides her study into six sections (Confederate Woman, Mammy, Tragic Mulatta, New Belle, Night Sister, and Mothers) focusing on a type of character. Roberts asserts that she "found it useful to recover some of these stereotype, or stock characters, to read Faulkner as a product, as well as producer, of the multifaceted place (and metaphor) called the South" (xi). Further, each of the six sections is further subdivided into a portion that demonstrates the context and representation of the archetype and into other portions that discuss the role of the archetype in Faulkner's fiction. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood's organization makes it a useful tool for scholars with a variety of pursuits. Students interested in a particular character type can look at individual chapters in Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, since Roberts's chapters read well as stand alone essays only rarely referring readers back to other chapters of the text.
The introduction of Faulkner and Southern Womanhood clearly delineates the structure which Roberts will follow throughout her book as well as mentioning the school-of-thought which influences her study. Roberts defines the six archetypes which she chooses to interpret in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin's use and explanation of classical and grotesque bodies. While Roberts does employ theorists, including Bakhtin, Derrida, and Cixous, to greater and lesser degrees, she maintains a prose style free of the opacity to which abstract literary theory lends itself. The combination of literary theory and language accessible to lay readers increases the range of students who might find Roberts's work useful and interesting.
Roberts uses the archetypes to "show how the models held up for women to measure themselves against come into play in Faulkner's fiction" (xiii). Faulkner and Southern Womanhood does not hunt for stereotypes so much as it finds echoes of stereotypes in Faulkner's corpus. Roberts demonstrates that though the stereotypes are shadows of Faulkner's characters, Faulkner is subverting the social order that constructs stereotypes to control women by deploying these dehumanizing stereotypes in his own fiction in a manner that demonstrates the paradoxical and false nature of the stereotypes.

This book is exquisitely written, fascinating--I highly recommend it not only for the Faulkner scholar, but for anyone (like me!) who is interested in his writings. Roberts' writing remains free from pretentious jargon, unlike so many scholarly works, and the ideas posited are original, thought provoking, and just plain INTERESTING!

"Faulkner's County" was photographed by Martin Dain in 1961. He came by the Forest Service's office (which was the same up-stairs office as the Lawyer's office in the movie "Intruder in the Dust") and asked if any of the people working there would guide him around Lafayette County. The Government couldn't help, so Dain ended up following the Watkin's Products salesman on his rounds to kitchens flung far and near around the country side.

"Faulkner's County" went out of print, and, as I heard it, there were copyright problems with Dain's estate, so it was never republished. Fortunately, the University of Mississippi Press published many of these same photographs in a volume entitled "Faulkner's World" in 1997, for Faulkner's 100th birthday. The primary differences in the two books are: 1) "Faulkner's County" accompanies the photographs with quotations from Faulkner while "Faulkner's World" accompanies the photographs with identifications of the subject matter; 2) the dust jacket for "Faulkner's County" is a wide angle shot of the dismal looking Sardis Reservoir in winter, while the photograph for the jacket of "Faulkner's World" is the town square in Oxford; and 3) Faulkner's World contains photographs of Faulkner's funeral that Dain made on a second trip to Oxford in 1962.

As luck would have it, Martin Dain captured Oxford just as it was beginning to rennovate the store fronts, figure out a workable traffic pattern for the town square, and before all the roads in the county were paved (or even gravelled for some of them). Many of these photographs are, in a sense, historic, because some things Dain saw hadn't changed very much since the Civil War. In fact, it is hard to identify some of the places today because the University, the city and the county have changed so much since Dain was there.

In my opinion, these are excellent photographs, making effective use of high speed black and white film with a wide angle lens. The team of mules plowing towards the camera, while the rest of the scene converges into endless rows of plowed land in the distance; the barren feeling of the country school room, the grassless yards; and most of all, the faces, complement the photographic style very well.

There has been very few times in the past that I have ever considered buying a coffee table book, most in my opinion just collect dust.

This book however is a wonderful pictorial account of Oxford Mississippi during the time when Faulkner still walked our streets. What I think is amazing is that some of the people pictured in this book as children still live in Oxford and are still an active and beautiful part of our local history.

This is an ideal gift for friends or family that have attended the University of Mississippi and have learned to love the small town personality of Oxford.

John Faulkner succeeded capturing the South better than any author I have read. I grew up near his location and in a family with the same moral and cultural values of his. His family could have been mine. If you want to travel to the South that used to be, that our families helped build after the Civil War and before Korea this is the best way I know to do it. His frugal use of words and his short sentences only add to the authenticity of his descriptions. For those of us from there he brings to life,as none other, what used to be and is to never be again.

A wonderful stylist, John tells the intimate story of the Faulkner family that no biographer or academic could. You simply don't know Faulkner until you've read this book.

I have been unable to take these CDs out of my automobile's CD changer since I bought this set. It has really rekindled my interest in Faulkner. I never cease to be awestruck by this great American writer's ability to capture the distinct voices of people of all classes, races, ages and of both genders. And the three able actors who read these stories--Debra Winger ("A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning"), Keith Carradine ("Spotted Horses"), and Arliss Howard ("That Evening Sun" and "Wash") all do an excellent job of rendering these voices with great authenticity and compassion. Besides being examples of Faulkner's best short stories, the stories provide an excllent introduction to several families that are central to his most powerful and memorable novels ("That Evening Sun" introduces us to the Compson children who are the subject and narrators of THE SOUND AND THE FURY; "Barn Burning" and "Spotted Horses" introduces us to the "tribe" of Snopeses who are the focus of Faulkners great trilogy, THE HAMLET, THE TOWN, and THE MANSION; and "Wash" gives us insight into Colonel Sutpen, whose full story is told in ABSALOM, ABSALOM!" The selection of stories also does a good job of representing the range of Faulkner's talent and vision--the folksy humor of country people, the tragic character of the oppressed and marginalized, and the frustration people experience when their traditional values fail to equip them for the intrusion of modernity. It's all here.

The CD set is augmented by several readings by Faulkner himself. (These are old recordings that were originally issued on vinyl and reissued on audiocassette, but it's great to have them on CD at long last.) Faulkner's reading from AS I LAY DYING is fast and breathless and is especially poignant in the Vardaman sections where he endows the youngest Bundren with a seer-like wisdom and nerve-rattling existentialism. The excerpt from perhaps his most difficult novel, A FABLE, and his brilliant Nobel Prize acceptance speech are stunning indictments an man's propensity to wage war coupled with a celebration of the human race's capactiy to endure and prevail in spite of depth of its folly.

My only regret is that I paid full price for these CDs at a bricks and mortar store (who shall remain nameless). Get it from Amazon.com! It's the best price I've seen. And with the money you save, treat yourself to Hans H. Skei's book, READING FAULKNER'S BEST SHORT STORIES, which discusses all of the stories on this CD.

Caedmon has done it again. This is an excellent selection of Faulkner's short stories (A Rose for Emily, Barn Burning, That Evening Sun, Spotted Horses, and Wash--all unabridged) and excerpts from a few of his longer works, all read very well with passion and control by Debra Winger, Keith Carradine and Arliss Howard. But the best part of this collection has to be the opportunity to hear Faulkner himself read from "As I Lay Dying", "A Fable" and "The Old Man", plus his 1949 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech. Running 5 hours long, on 5 discs, this is a great collection for Faulkner enthusiasts and audio book addicts alike.

I agree with the previous review: Faulkner is an acquired taste. However, if you like his work and want to own some of his greatest novels without breaking the bank, this book fills the bill. It's a high-quality book. It's bound well, the paper stock is not flimsy and it holds up to reading after reading. I received mine as a graduation gift in 1997. Since then it's been read by me, some friends, family members and coworkers and it shows little wear.

These are some of Faulkner's greatest works. To own them under one cover for this price? You won't find a better deal.

You probably either love Faulkner's work or you hate it. If you hate it I won't argue with you. There are good reasons why you might not like his work (talk about acquired tastes). If you love him then you can't really find a much better deal than this book. "Absalom, Absalom," "If I Forget Thee Oh Jerusalem," and "The Hamlet" are some of his best work and you can get this book, which is a nice little volume in about every way, for about 2/3 of what you'd pay to get them seperately as paperbacks. I'm not overly impressed by what I've read of "The Unvanquished," and scholars seem to share my opinion, but with works as good as the other three I think a little filler is okay.

The Library of America (LOA) has done a wonderful job of publishing all of Faulkner's novels in five compact, uniform editions. Besides being handsome, beautifully typeset volumes, they contain the texts of one America's most brilliant authors in versions that are as authoritative as can reasonably be expected. All five volumes were edited by two of the foremost Faulkner scholars--Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner; and each volume contains their notes on the text and a detailed chronology of Faulkner's life (In case you ever find yourself wondering when Faulkner entered first grade, the year was 1905; he enjoyed drawing and painting.) The scholarship and care that went into the preparation of the LOA Faulkner is impeccable.

Within the LOA series, the novels are arranged chronologically (though the volumes were not released in sequence). Consequently, the present volume contains the last two novels (The Town and The Mansion) in Faulkner's great trilogy, The Snopes. To get the first (and critically proabably the best) novel in the trilogy, The ;Hamlet, you'll have to purchase William Faulkner: Novels 1936-1940 (ISBN 0-940450-55-0). Since that volume also includes Faulkner's masterpiece Absalom! Absalom!, it is worth the purchase price. In my opinion, it is impossible to overpraise The Snopes trilogy, and it is difficult to summarize its themes. Suffice it to say, the trilogy encompasses many genres (myth, folklore, legend, realism, epic) while provideing an insightful and scathing commentary on the American dream, society, and the tension between traditional values and modernity. (Faulkner's insights make Theodore Dreiser look like an entertainment Tonight! reporter.) Although The Town has been called a "weak plank between two substantial boulders," I have to confess a fondness for its depiction of the goofy and sexually naive town lawyer, Gavin Stevens (also the hero of Faulkner's Knight's Gambit short stories). I would also venture to say that readers' uncomfortability with The Town may also be a reflection of the fact that this part of the trilogy represents the "real world of the present"--not our mythic past which we nostalgically recast to flatter our self-image (The Hamlet), nor an expression of our "wildest dreams," what we expect our life to be like "when our ship comes in" (The Mansion). Most of life, in other words, is taken up not with valiant struggles and bold accomplishments, but with the pettiness of domestic life and trying to get along with others. The Town (published in 1957), therefore, can be seen as the flip side of Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and all the other 1950s family sitcoms. Taken in that vein, I think it's a good satire and a delectable opera bouffe between two grand operas.

Daniel J. Singal in William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (1997; Univeristy of North Carolina Press) pinpoints November 1940 as the date when Faulkner's genius and talent began to irreversibly fade. While on a camping trip Faulkner, always a heavy drinker and surely already an alcoholic for many years, suffered brain damage when he passed out while drinking. If this is true, that means all three novels collected in Novels 1957-1962 were written during the Nobel laureate's waning years. Concerning the many passages of brilliant writing in The Mansion, Singal notes that many of these had been previously published as short stories and only reworked to become part of the novel. It is hard to imagine how The Mansion could have been better (though I'm sure there is no shortage of Faulkner scholars willing to suggest some scenarios). As far as The Reivers goes, I have long recommended this novel to friends who want to read something by Faulkner but are intimidated by the structural challenges of The Sound and the Fury or Absalom! Absalom! The Reivers is a nostalgic look at the early days of Jefferson (the key town in Faulkner's invented Yoknapatawpha County) told mostly through the eyes of a young boy. The story is linear and easy to follow, and the humor is some of Faulkner's funniest and most heart-warming. If this is Faulkner at his most diminished, most American novelists writing today should be so diminished!

So buy both Novels 1936-1940 and Novels 1957-1962 and treat yourself to The Snopes trilogy. Then, after you've finished it, rent "The Long Hot Summer" and see what a mangle Hollywood made of Faulkner's richly imagined world.

It is too bad that the first novel "The Hamlet" is not included (it appears in an earlier volume of this excellent series of The Library Of America) with "The Town" and "The Mansion" in this wonderful tale of growth and maturity of the outcast Snopes clan to a Snopes family of civic prominence. The three novels need to be read in their order to feel the strength of uneducated and poor individuals struggling for opportunities to better themselves, successfully, to claim the privileges of wealth that only the aristocracy of landowners enjoy. This is the new Yoknapatawpha County of automobiles and areoplanes. The old wilderness of the bear hunters was long ago paved over for speed. "The Reivers" is a long hearty laugh at innocence in a whore house. Told from a boy's viewpoint, the action is very adult and funny as adults pursue their urges for sex and gambling. The horse race is a fine piece of sustained Faulkner writing. Buy this book. It is a keeper.

Nephew Jim Faulkner talks about his famous uncle. These stories will be appreciated by Faulkner fans-- no one else. The nine stories provide a look at an off-duty Faulkner. One of the more interesting tales explains why Oxford has two Confederate monuments.