Product Description
Both clear and scholarly, this book provides an introduction to William Faulkner, his style, techniques and themes, and it offers a detailed, illuminating analysis of the nineteen novels.

Faulkner is a difficult artist. A cooperative reading of his novels can enhance the pleasure that his art affords and deepen appreciation of it. The author's aim is to reveal the greatness of Faulkner's art and the scope and profundity of his personal vision of life. The Guide is divided into three sections. The first describes the dominant patterns in the fiction, by isolating Faulkner's major themes and by analyzing his narrative techniques and style. The second section offers extensive, individual interpretations of the nineteen novels, tracing the development of Faulkner's ideas. The final section contains detailed chronologies of the difficult novels like The Sound and the Fury. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Has Its Uses
The author explains Faulkner in a direct, straightforward, "Hemingway" style, risking reductiveness but undeniably expanding the potential audience for the book. Readers entirely new to Faulkner may benefit from the general introduction as well as the interpretations (basically sound, "widely-received" readings) of individual novels. Others may understandably take a pass on the first two sections in favor of the third, which provides a breakdown of the narrative order as well as the "actual" chronology of each of the chapters in Faulkner's novels. Included are scene descriptions based on compiled evidence from the chapter as well as verbal clues that alert the reader to scene shifts in a narrator's consciousness.

A downside:Like most other commentators on Faulkner, Volpe often takes too seriously the seriousness of Faulkner.This is especially apparent in discussions of "Absalom, Absalom!"Unquestionably, it is apocalyptic, tragic, visionary narrative, but it is also supreme farce.Readers need to know that it's OK be bemused by the first chapter and to laugh out loud at the second.Critics have done a grave disservice to Faulkner by representing the novel with such unrelenting sobriety.(Reading Robert Browning's "Caliban Upon Setebos" might be the first step to a cure from much insensitivity to the playfulness of Faulkner's discourse.)

Finally, the page references to Faulkner's novels have not been updated to agree with the current Vintage editions. And the decision to ignore all of the short fiction might have been more palatable had the author not cast aesthetic judgement upon it, in effect "ranking" it beneath the novels. Faulkner's short fiction is not only of the same high order as his long narratives but is inseparable from them.

Tremendously Useful
The second and third sections of this book are invaluable to the serious reader or repeat teacher of Faulkner.Volpe has done all of the difficult sorting and taxonomy we are obliged to do before we can come to our own terms with a novel.Who is each narrator or character, what do the events look like in chronological order, etc. To have that kind of work done for you for such novels as "Absalom! Absalom!" and "The Sound and the Fury" is worth the price of admission.

In the second section, each novel is given a reading, and while one may not always agree entirely, they almost invariably identify all the major features and events of the novels and are often closer to very careful glossed summaries than they are argumentative.If you've read a novel, these are comprehensive enough to return to you whatever you might have forgotten.If you haven't read a novel, they function very adequately to convey the essentials.

The third section provides detailed chronologies of events for nine novels.

If you're interested in making your own sense of the novels, Volpe's meticulous work will allow you to get down to business more quickly. ... Read more

Product Description
'Between grief and nothing I will take grief'. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger is juxtaposed with fatal injuries of the spirit. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (14)

Weird Phraseology
Would someone please tell me what this passage means: (on page 83 of this edition, and 97 of the original) ". . and McCord held the invisible dog; it was named Moreover now, from the bible, the poor man's table." What does the "Moreover now" mean? I want to scream. I am at a university library right now, doing research on this passage. I thought maybe it was an error, or printer's error. I found a massive concordance to this work, and it is in there, verbatim. People! People! This book! This book! I am 46 now, and first read Faulkner when I was in my early twenties. I read 3 of his novels before I was 25. They were: "The Sound and the Fury", "The Hamlet", and "Absalom, Absalom". Now more than 20 years later I finally get back to Faulkner; and it was this book. After two references to this book, in two different Jean-Luc Godard films: "Breathless" and "Pierrot le Fou", I had to read it. Moreover, I understand this novel is not highly thought of. In fact, when I was browsing through some criticism of Faulkner, I came across an essay: "Faulkner's failures. . ." Moreover, I have an New American Library edition of "Sartoris", and in the introduction yet another commentator disparages WP. But this is a good novel. I do not understand why this novel has been so maligned. Perhaps some of the metaphors are strained?Perhaps not. It is certainly worth reading again. And the story, the narrative is certainly not, I repeat NOT, strained. The characterizaion is phenomenal. I think the passages of the "tall convict" on the river are second only to "Moby Dick". Moreover, they obtain an almost unrealistic quality. It has been said elsewhere that Faulkner's writings on "man vs nature" (ie "The Bear") are comparable to "Moby Dick".

When The Levee Breaks
William Faulkner was one of the great American literary experimentalists, and "The Wild Palms" offers one of his most interesting ideas: Two interwoven stories, different in plot and theme yet linked by man's imprisoned condition.

In the first, titled "Wild Palms" without the "The", we meet a staid internist who becomes a married woman's object of desire. After surrendering to a couple of cosmic twists, the two are carried away by passion to embrace a kind of loving doom.

In the second, "Old Man", a convict is plunged into the middle of a major Mississippi River flood with a pregnant woman he rescues for company. "All in the world I want is just to surrender", thinks he, but Old Man River seems to have other plans.

First published in 1939 as "If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem", this double novella famously namechecks another contemporary American author as "Hemingwaves". Others have noted how "Wild Palms" resembles two of Hemingway's better known works, "A Farewell To Arms" and the short story "Hills Like White Elephants". I believe they are right, and that Faulkner was also inspired by "In Our Time", Hemingway's first short-story collection which intersperses short stories with a running series of sequential anecdotes in breakaways that play off one another thematically. "Wild Palms" and "Old Man" do a similar sort of thing, if not as well.

One problem is that of the two stories, "Wild Palms" is much better than "Old Man". We get in "Wild Palms" an unsettling erotic tale at once romantic and misogynistic, with the woman, Charlotte, a yellow-eyed Bohemian wannabe willing to abandon her husband and daughters for a man she doesn't really seem to love. She'd rather die than give up her freedom, to the point where death becomes a kind of objective, a kind of nihilistic declaration of indepedence.

"You die anyway, but I had rather drown in the ocean than be urped up onto a strip of dead beach and be dried away by the sun into a little foul smear with no name to it, just THIS WAS for an epitaph," she says. Her lover Harry has more rooted survival instincts, but can't push himself away from passions he has been abjuring too long.

The novella isn't plot-perfect, or at all sympathetic in its characters, but it keeps you reading. In the process it communicates some of Faulkner's most piercing ideas in language both sturdy and fierce.

"Old Man" is more often anthologized for some reason. I've come across it both in isolation and with "Wild Palms". It works better in the latter form, as a somewhat comic reprieve with more action than the talkier "Wild Palms". The unnamed protagonist of "Old Man" (they are all unnamed) is completely disinterested in freedom, to the point of being mortified of it. Prison is all he knows; his escape completely involuntary. The story moves doggedly from setpiece to setpiece, with much potential wasted. The pregnant woman seldom rises above a cipher.

Some worthy observations and chuckles are weighed down by Faulkner's tendency to burden otherwise inarticulate characters with streams-of-consciousness as convoluted as calculus. At one point snakes are referred to as "ophidian festoons". That's a new one on me.

Overall, "The Wild Palms" remains a rich, immersive ride. Even if it doesn't represent a return to his Yoknapatawpha County, both stories are partially set in Mississippi and as Southern Gothic as anything can be said to be. Faulkner fans will relish that distinctive burled voice of yearning and pain. More casual readers, meanwhile, will absorb and perhaps even enjoy the doomed-romance story for both its heady passions and its ruminations on the human condition, crystallized in one character's famous decision in choosing between nothing and grief.

Something about the vitality of being alive keeps the characters in "The Wild Palms" afloat. The same thing keeps you reading.

Pain is better than the nothingness of death.
Such an impressive book. Probably my favorite Faulkner. Much easier to read than much of what he's famous for, and as another reviewer said, a novel that's much to forgotten for how beautiful it is.

I actually found it in a used book store in Istanbul, where books in english were rare--if it wasn't for that, I probably wouldn't have read it.

Such a stunning tale of love, an affair, and the aftermath of tragedy.

Of floods and "hemingwaves"
Originally published in 1939, it was not until 1990 that readers were finally able to read this novel as Faulkner intended.Prior to the Library of America edition, The Wild Palms was published as two separate short stories ("Wild Palms" and "Old Man") and the texts were not alternated as they are in the new edition; furthermore, this new edition resurrected Faulkner's original title for the work, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.To read the novel in both its manifestations is a strange experience.Read separately, the two stories are only marginally successful, have a number of loose ends and bare absolutely no resemblance to one another; read in the Library of America edition, the reader begins to see that the stories act as each other's counterpoint by juxtaposing the story of man battling society against man battling against nature.Neither man wins their battle and the theme of alienation predominates.

Viewed from an elemental viewpoint, these two stories concern themselves with the basic struggle between man and woman.One has to really do some hard searching throughout all literature to come up with two male characters that match Harry Wilbourne and the Prisoner for pure unmitigated naivety and botchery.Harry is finishing the last few weeks of his residency at a New Orleans hospital when he meets Charlotte Rittenmeyer.He is putty in the hands of Charlotte (already married with two children) who convinces him to run away together to seek a notion of love that does not die and "only leaves you when you are not good enough, worthy enough."He is deluded, seduced and brainwashed by his aggressive lover and proves to be a complete failure.Much to Charlotte's chagrin, he does not fit in with the bohemian lifestyle she seeks and spends inordinate time worrying about financial matters and respectability; more importantly, his libido does not match that of Charlotte and he is continually being attacked by his sexually insatiable partner leaving him spent and questioning his masculinity.Although Harry is very close to becoming a doctor, he gives the impression that he does not fully understand the act of conception and birth control is haphazard; eventually Charlotte becomes pregnant which leades to Harry's most serious blunder.

Whereas Harry is tempted by Charlotte and succumbs to a lifestyle of romantic platitudes and sex, the Prisoner, the main character of "Old Man", finds himself at the mercy of nature and trapped into caring for a pregnant woman he has saved from the great Mississippi flood of 1927.The event interrupted his all male existence as a convict in a prison labor camp, and exposed him to a wild world of devastating flood waters and destruction.His only goals are to survive, to protect the woman and child from death, and to fulfill his responsibiliites and oath to the prison officials to return with the rescued woman.Faulkner depicts the Prisoner as an insect floating on a raging river who has no control over his situation and only survives by his wits.There is simply no time for romance or romantic posturing.And even though he helps to deliver the woman's child and provides for their welfare, she is seen only as a burden and no romantic (or sexual) feelings develop between the man and woman.He only wants to "turn his back on her forever, on all pregnant and female life forever and return to that monastic existence of shotguns and shackles, where he would be secure from it all."The Prisoner is a simple realist - he harbors no romantic delusions and because he is dealing with the natural world he is able to succeed while Harry and Charlotte, living amongst their romantic delusions, fail.The last words of the Prisoner (now safely back in prison), which ends the novel, make it clear that he has had no second thoughts."Women, _____! (Faulkner's blanked out word of the earlier editions is finally printed in the Library of America edition!).

Many readers have come to the conclusion that this is Faulkner's A Farewell to Arms.Indeed, there is a similarity between the names of the main characters in that novel (Catherine and Frederic Henry) and in Wild Palms (Charlotte and Harry) and some of the settings are similar: the lake and the snowy mining camp in Wild Palms, and the Lake Country of Italy and a Swiss chalet in Hemingway's novel.Also, the birth of a child leads to the death of both women characters.Faulkner even throws in a Hemingway reference in his novel.In a response to a toast, "Drink up, ye armourous sons.Keep up with the dog", McCord, a reporter friend of Harry, says, "Yah.Set ye armourous sons, in a sea of hemingwaves."But Faulkner is not one to spend much time sympathizing or sentimentalizing with his silly lovers.By interlacing one story of altruistic love with another dealing with survival in the real world, Faulkner lets the reader know where his feelings lie.

I am probably short changing this work by giving it only a three star rating, but I feel that once Faulkner leaves the safe confines of Yoknapatawpha County his work suffers.It is as if, in an attempt to apply the themes developed in that mythological county onto a more cosmopolitan canvas, he is no longer working with the same palate, but with one with fewer colors and maybe bought in a Hollywood five and dime.

If it doesn't have punctuation in the title, it's not really Faulkner
I supposed this was not a major work because I hadn't heard about it before.Nope, it's major.The most popular form of this book is to rip it in half and such that Old Man is by itself as a short novel.That's really a shame.Old Man, is a rollicking story of a man swept away on the Mississippi during the flooding of New Orleans in 1927 (Hoover's deft handling of the crisis is a large part of the reason that he became president).However, the story doubles its power when it is juxtaposed with the story of two lovers flooded out of civilization by their aching need for each other.You get two uncontrollable forces of nature, both horrifiying to encounter, and both demolishing the prisons within which the protagonists of each story are previously held (let's say the medical career path of one, and actual prison for the other).A primary question in each is whether it's better to be back in the prison or not, and there's a strong case for yes in each.

Both stories are good, but what makes this spectacular is simply the fact that the experiment is attempted.Who does things like this?There's a thematic link between the stories, but it's fairly loose.However, the back and forth interspersion paces the stories perfectly.In non-stop presentation, I think the tone of either of these would be too much to take.As it is, though, this is actually a page turner.More impressively, these aren't two stories that were slapped together (a la the Golden Slumbers medley (God forgive me) or Scenes from an Italian Restaurant) but were written at the same time after a major heartbreak.There's also the greatest two word last line of any novel that I'm aware of.I won't spoil it.

This isn't a great introduction to Faulkner, but it's a fantastic example of why people who love him love him.Milan Kundera singled this one out, maybe not as a favorite, but as a book that should be more highly recognized.I couldn't agree more.Faulkner has the problem of too many masterpieces.At this stage of his career, it's hard to ignore any of them. ... Read more

Product Description

William Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America's most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources -- including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner's daughter and lovers -- Jay Parini has crafted a biography that delves into the mystery of this gifted and troubled writer. His Faulkner is an extremely talented, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage who somehow transcends his limitations. Parini weaves the tragedies and triumphs of Faulkner's life in with his novels, serving up a biography that's as engaging as it is insightful.

Customer Reviews (8)

Still Waiting
After 4 decades of reading and studying Faulkner, I believe Parini's book gets us closer to taking the measure of the man; but I wonder if even Parini realises what a true genius Faulkner was.I want some scholar to say finally that he's not only America's greatest writer (of all time), but the finest writer in English that the 20th century produced. The literary criticism here is a bit hit and miss, but mostly hits.The current literary fads and obsessions at times tend to dilute the focus on Faulkner's achievement, but this could have been a lot worse. In general, Faulkner scholarship has yet to rise to the level of quality of Faulkner himself.The one notable exception is Cleanth Brooks' WILLIAM FAULKNER: THE YOKNAPATAWPHA COUNTRY, which after over 40 years is still the most distinguished, best written, most level-headed, and downright brilliant explorationof the Yoknapatawpha novels.

One Matchless Time is time spent with Southern genius Wm. Faulkner
William Faulkner was a genius! The 1949 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature was a complex man, He was "a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Faulkner was a great artist but a troubled human being. He was an alcoholic, womanizer (several affairs followed his marriage to the troubled Estelle Oldham), lier
(such as his wild tales of his spurious adventures as a flier in the World War I RAF!), poor husband, prodigal son of the rich soil of his Mississippi birthplace.
Faulkner was more! He was the creator of Yoknapatawhpa county
bringing to the realm of world literature such characters as
Flemn Snopes, the Bundren and Compson families, Temple Drake,
Joe Christmas and so many more. Along with Balzac and Dickens he was the creator of a whole world of fictional life in what he
called his "postage stamp sized landscape."
Joseph Blotner has written the best book on FAulkner but I would use this fine work by Parini if I was teaching an English
class on the great "Dixie Epress" from Oxford.
Though an academic, Jay Parini does a good job in summarizing the complex novels; relating the life of FAulkner and putting this material down in an easy to read style freeof pyschobabble.
I enjoyed this fine book especially the details on Faulkner's
complicated family history in Mississippi which was dominated
by the memory of his great-grandfather Colonel Falkner.
If you need to know a lot about Faulkner in a short space of time turn to Parini. Well done!

One matchless eternity
This briskly paced biography of Faulkner summons the image of the man very well, and brings some resonance to the extraordinary period from 1928 to the nineteen forties when the inspiration to create a mysterious world in a series of masterworks overtook this shambling southerner breaking out of the initial conditions of his birth. The gestation of the first novels then sudden appearance of Sound and the Fury is one of the great literary tales of the twentieth century, and the extant vision is of the Golgotha of a lost and passing world, no sentimentality needed for this tragic view, of the peculiar and flawed society of the South after the Civil War and Reconstruction. Faulkner's work echoes this ominous mood in his matchless evocation and cathartic cutting to the core of the unconscious of that world and summons, next to Moby Dick, the tragic genre to the telling of the tale of the American Dream.

Well Done!
What was William Faulkner doing when he wrote THE SOUND AND THE FURY, LIGHT IN AUGUST, THE HAMLET, ABSALOM, ABSALOM! and GO DOWN, MOSES? In this fascinating biography, Professor Parini tells you, as his narrative moves from Faulkner's life to his work and back again, describing this great writer`s personal and historical world while analyzing his demanding oeuvre.

How did Faulkner acquire his estate, Rowan Oak, after only modest sales for his first books? How did his ultimately lucrative connection to Hollywood affect his work? The answers to such questions are in this thorough, but not long, book. On this level, this biography is a feast for Faulkner fans.

Even so, this biography has a maddening quality. In particular, this reader was blind-sided as Faulkner, without any preparation by the author, recited complete Shakespearean sonnets at a dinner party, acknowledged his love of French literature, or spoke French. These incidents obviously capture influences on Faulkner's artistic sensibility. Yet, they are never really built into the experience of the historical man and artist thatParini describes.

Faulkner, in addition, was obviously well-read. Yet Parini never discusses what Faulkner was reading, when he was reading it, and how the reading affected him. For an isolated and struggling writer, his reading-though hard to pin down-had to be animportant influence and inspiration. In my opinion, occasional references to his reading would have been interesting. But as it is, this biography shows Faulkner in his most creative period without any such literary interests or precursors. In ONE MATCHLESS Time, he is either working madly or on an alcoholic binge.

A Sad Life And One Filled With Integrity
Parini does his best work investigating the early days of Faulkner and putting them into a social, specifically Southern, context, but unlike Blotner he manages to enlarge that context into the whole space of American modernism.He makes you feel Faulkner's yearning to be accepted as part of an international avant-garde, and yet at the same time he didn't want that, he wanted, like his grandfather,to be a writer revered by his peers down home.Parini does enough with the "gay male friends" theme to warrant further scholarly investigation into gay modernist Southern art and literature, though such a topic doesn't necessarily depemd on the weight of Faulkner's name for it to be interesting in and of itself.And how about his friendship with Bil and Helen Baird and the whole puppeteering thing, I could read about this forever.

About the women in Faulkner's life, Parini stumbles a little.I don't think he makes Estelle, Jill, Meta Carpenter, Jean Stein or Joan Williams as interesting as Blotner did.They all kind of converge into an foggy enemy figure, like Judy and Madeleine in Hitchcock's VERTIGO--maybe this was Parini's intention (to paint his hero as a victim of sexual obsession), but the truth is that all of these women were very different characters, and in my opinion still the best book written about Faulkner is the wonderful A LOVING GENTLEMAN, Meta Carpenter Wilde's very moving memoir of her love affair with W. Faulkner.That said, I admire Parini's book and the skill with which it comes together.It makes you want to re-read some of the neglected books, I especially like his defense of the cobbled-together 50s collection BIG WOODS.The truth is I could read a new Faulkner biography every year, they're all pretty good and this one, as the newest, deserves the attention of all of us. ... Read more

Product Description
Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, THE UNVANQUISHED focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (21)

A tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit
Set in the old South in the finishing years of the Civil War, this novel follows members of one family, and in particular Bayard Sartoris,as they struggle and try to prevail under the circumstances where most of the prevailing social and personal relations are constantly challenged and even permanently overturned. The writing is quintessential Faulkner, with all particularities of southern dialect and narrative that tries to stay close to the protagonists' mental musings. The story is remarkable and intriguing in that the interpersonal relations between different characters aren neither predictable nor straightforward. In particular it eschews facile delineation between various parties in the war, and no individual fits into a stereotypical category. Sometimes the closest friendships are between those who should be the worst of enemies, and at other occasions those whom you regarded to be close confidants that in the end betray you. These are in fact all too familiar circumstances in most of our lives and in all generations. It's what makes Faulkner's novels so timeless and valuable to read.

"...defeated men's pride and indomitable unregret..."
Faulkner could tell a story, no doubt about that! He had the comic timing of a great yarn-spinner. He could depict a fool or a scoundrel so foolishly or scurrilously that you have to laugh, even when the depiction is nothing more than stereotype. He could chant the pangs of impossible love as lasciviously as a troubadour. Oh yes, he was a master of language, a great writer, far too revered for me to dare pass judgment on his work, on even this patchwork novel made of magazine stories potched together to earn some quick cash and nobody's favorite among all his novels. But perhaps because it isn't one of the jewels in Faulkner's literary crown, I can get away with stating a few reservations about Faulkner in general, without being accused of lèse majesté.

All seven sections of The Unvanquished are told in first-person reflections by Bayard Sartoris, first a boy then a young man. Usually, the reader has to suppose a 'distance' between the author and the narrator of such a book, but in this case that distance is problematic. Compromised. The boy's voice is far too philosophical and mature -- too obviously Faulkner's own -- to be mistaken for ironic detachment. One might say, well, it's the voice of the older man remembering, but it isn't written with that tenor. It's a characteristic of Faulkner's work that certain kinds of "knowledge" are unacquired, inherent, in the blood. Bayard is utterly, childishly naive about his own world, which is plantation life during the Civil War and Reconstruction, yet he "knows" with an eerie prescience how events will turn. That kind of "knowledge" is one of my quibbles with Faulkner. I don't believe a word of it, but it's so intrinsic to Faulkner's perceptions that I and everyone else simply has to take it on faith. Or else leave it, and leave with a slightly acrid aftertaste, as I have tasted after every Faulkner novel I've read. I've read nearly all of them, by the way, since my first encounter with his story "A Rose for Emily" in high school around 1958.

Bayard's stories introduce most of the characters of Faulkner's later novels - the Sartorises, Snopeses, Compsons, McCaslins; the planter elites, the slaves and ex-slaves and half-slaves, the poor white trash; the oracular oldsters, the indestructible Southern womanhood, the cowards and the reluctant heroes. Alongside Bayard the boy and man is the 'knowing' slave Ringo, Bayard's age and his constant childhood mate. Ringo is "more intelligent" than Bayard but utterly circumscribed by his race, his fate. And Ringo is inscrutable, as all of Faulkner's non-white characters are, inscrutable to a white man, that is, and Faulkner never forgets for a moment that he IS a white man. Racism is my second quibble. Faulkner is profoundly racist, in that he considers and depicts race as an absolute determinant of character and destiny, a kind of moral/mental DNA. The most tragic characters in all of Faulkner's novels - Light in August, for instance - are those who become confused about "who they are" racially. In our times, outrage has been poured on writers like Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad for their perceived racism, yet Faulkner's kind of racism is much more pervasive and pernicious. In The Unvanquished, racism is the moral standard of behavior. A "good" white person takes care of his dependent blacks with unfaltering duty; a "good" black person is unwaveringly loyal to his white "family". The tragedy of the Civil War, as depicted here, was the destruction of a paternalistic order that worked for the best of both races, and the aimless, futile chaos that resulted, which allowed the "worst" of both races to flourish.

And that's the basic Southern apologia, the Myth of the Lost Cause. It's brilliantly expounded in this book; I have to give Faulkner credit for making his case effectively in prose, as effective as Gone with the Wind or Birth of a Nation telling the same lies in cinema. Of course, the Civil War scenes in The Unvanquished are the mock-heroic exploits of two boys well removed from real warfare, but Faulkner's distant War is simple fabulation. His Yankees are either hopeless dolts or brigands. It's the humor of Buster Keaton's wonderful but wrong film The General; wrong deliberately I say, because the historic train chase on which Keaton's film was based was completely opposite, a Unionist exploit rather than a Confederate. Likewise, Faulkner's portrayal of 'Reconstruction' is a fabric of Ku Klux Klan and White League propaganda, the post-war redemptionist myth that allowed the Republican Party to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and to allow a hundred years of Jim Crow apartheid seasoned by lynchings and racial cleansings of any thriving black community in the South or West. Unfortunately, Faulkner was such a genius of mythologizing - along with several other brilliant Southern writers - that most readers will find my objections to his ideas either offensive or indefensible.

Other reviewers of this novel have paid it the dubious compliment of praising its straightforward syntax: short sentences (mostly), simple descriptions, uncomplicated chronology. Those who don't like Faulkner, who hate Faulkner in fact, usually object to his complexity of language, his endless sentences, his obscurity of allusion, his chaotic simultaneity of events decades removed from each other. His style, in short. That is NOT my objection, and besides, such syntactical briar patches are not numerous in The Unvanquished except in the last chapter, "An Odor of Verbena", which is quite dissimilar in tone and manner from the rest. But Faulkner's crunchy perplexity is not without problems for a skeptical reader. It's profoundly evasive, really, a way to avoid decisive analyses and pragmatic ethical evaluations. It's meant to be ambiguous. Elusive. Exclusive of any sort of probing "yankee" mentality that wants to know how the author knows what he knows so purely ... and so pretentiously. Faulkner IS pretentious. Can anyone deny that?

Now settle down, friends and non-friends! Disagree as amply and eloquently as you will, but don't rant at me! I'm only exercising my First Amendment right to express my humble opinion on an issue which has no significance for national security. I already know that I'll need to re-read one of Faulkner's iconic masterworks in the next few months, and to come back with further, hopefully deeper thoughts about it.

The French connection...
There is a particular "French connection" with this novel, and there is an overall connection between the French people and William Faulkner, and none of the other reviewers have raised this matter. It was the subject of a recent article in "The Guardian," which said that he was the second favorite French author, beating Flaubert, Stendhal, Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, Camus and Celine. Only Marcel Proust was ranked ahead of him. Faulkner spent only a very limited period in France, once during the 20's, and once in 1945 when he worked with the film director, Renoir. Apparently the peasant revolt in the Vendee, led by the clerics, against the forces of the French revolution, resonated with his feelings about the "lost cause" of the South's fight in the American Civil War. For some reason, certainly not evident to me, he entitled the chapter concerning Bayard and Ringo's (who was apparently named after the French victory at Marengo) hunt for Grumby as "Vendee."Furthering some of the inexplicable possible connections on this matter, in Honore de Balzac's great novel on the Vendee revolt, entitled "Les Chouans," the first chapter is "Ambuscade," the same name that Faulkner used for the first chapter in this book. Mere coincidence?

Aside from French connections, the style and content in Faulkner's novels continues to dazzle, and "The Unvanquished" is no exception. The chapters are set during the Civil War, starting with the fall of Vicksburg, through the 10 year period of Reconstruction following the war. The setting is the familiar, to Faulkner readers, Yoknapatawpha County, in northwestern Mississippi. Although the occupation of the county by Union forces is depicted in the novel, and there are numerous killings in the book, there is not a single incident of a Northern or Southern soldier being killed there by the opposite side.(of course, "far off" deaths, such as Drusilla's fiancée at Shiloh are noted). There are numerous memorable scenes, from the night marching of recently freed black slaves to the "Jordan River,"( that borders of Magic Realism) to the generosity of a Union officer who played along with Granny's ruse, to the courage, and ultimate submission of Drusilla, who was forced back into her pre-war role by her female contemporaries, a la "Rosie the Riveter" after the Second World War.

The characterization of black-white relations in Faulkner novels has been, I'm sure, the subject of several PhD dissertations. While I found the relationship of Ringo and Bayard 10 years after the war somewhat implausible, much is redeemed by the actions of Loosh during the conflict. Faulkner no doubt digested the folk tales involving the South's continued defiance of the North, and this was reflected in the somewhat embroidered tale of the unlikely alliance of Ringo and Granny fooling those Union officers. What continues to astonish about Faulkner are the sometimes vertiginous twist and turns, such as the interaction between Bayard and Drusilla in "An Odor of Verbena," and the quick suspense involving the question of whether to tell his father, the indomitable Col. Sartoris, who has already begun to find solace in brandy.

Other reviewers say this novel is an excellent introduction to Faulkner, since it is more "straightforward," others say no. I'm divided on the question. I believe it is as good as any of the others, and has numerous unexplained complexities. It is a joy to read, and deserves the full 5-stars, as do all his others.

Finally, a thought for the present: Col. Sartoris, at times a rigid man of the past, viewing the world through a certain structure, had numerous books on his shelf, including Napoleon's "Maxims," and rather surprisingly, the Koran!

Approachable Faulkner
A local English professor's answer to a radio call-in question, "What's a good place to start reading Faulkner?" sent me looking for "The Unvanquished."Thisshort novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction was created out of a series of magazine stories written by Faulkner in the 1930s, with one previously unpublished story added.Faulkner maintains his famous stream-of-consciousness style, but manages to remain approachable, perhaps because his narrator is a young boy, around whom (and his slave/friend) the stories revolve. The narrative is a little disjointed on a chapter-to-chapter basis, as each was written to stand alone.Apparently Faulkner didn't add much to enhance continuity in the novel format.

Like "Cold Mountain", the story focuses on the homefront during the Civil War.Rather than spouses, children and older people are the lead characters.Their ingenuity during the hard times of war is impressive, as is the general chaos surround organizing a war effort.

The book's last chapter "An Odor of Verbena" focuses on the Reconstruction period.Our current politics can't compete with this era for danger and intrigue, depicted at the local level in this story.

Some of my forays into Faulkner have foundered on his infamously difficult style--dense language, paragraph-long sentences and chapter-long paragraphs."The Unvanquished" lowers this hurdle while retaining the sense that you are inside the character's minds while they deal with the challenge and tragedy that is the Civil War.

Recommended for all adult readers and even teenage readers with an interest in literary fiction or the Civil War.

The Unvanquished - book
This book was so hard to find locally, and was needed for a class.The price and delivery were amazing - thanks so much!! ... Read more

Product Description
William Faulkner (1897-1962) remains the preeminent literary chronicler of the American South and a giant of American arts and letters. Creatively obsessed with problems of race, identity, power, politics, and family dynamics, he wrote novels, stories, and lectures that continue to shape our understanding of the region's promises and problems. His experiments and inventions in form and style have influenced generations of writers.

Originally published in 1974 as a two-volume edition, and extensively updated and condensed in a 1991 reissue, Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography remains the quintessential resource on the Nobel laureate's life and work. The Chicago Tribune said, "This is an overwhelming book, indispensable for anyone interested in the life and works of our greatest contemporary novelist." That invaluable 1991 edition is now back in print.

Blotner, a friend and one-time colleague of Faulkner, brings a vivid, personalized tone to the biography, as well as a sense of masterful, comprehensive scholarship. Using letters, personal interviews, reminiscences, critical work, and other primary sources, Blotner creates a detailed and nuanced portrait of Faulkner from his birth to his death. The revision of the original 1974 biography incorporates commentary on the plethora of Faulkner criticism, family memoirs and posthumously published works that appeared in the wake of the first version. It also examines collections of letters and other materials that only came to light after the original publication.

Featuring a detailed chronology of Faulkner's life and a genealogical chart of his family Faulkner is authoritative and essential both for literary scholars and for anyone wanting to know about the life of one of nation's preeminent authors. Blotner's masterpiece is the template for all biographical work on the acclaimed writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

An earlier reviewer: "It won't be displaced for many years to come"
... couldn't agree more. My copy's a doorstop on a little-used door.

A book such as this is only justified as a first biography, which it most definitely is not.

The author's (unfortunate) name classifies an epithetical genre all its own--the unreadable, endless compendium of mind-numbing factoids: the blotner.

The facts- all the facts-
This is a very long and detailed biography which tells more than most people will want to know about its subject. What disappointed me however was not the work of Blotner which was painstaking and caring, but the figure he depicted. The great writer and Faulkner truly is a great writer seems in his life much smaller than his work. It is not only his unhappy relationship with wife and family, but a general spirit of meanness which prevailed in many of his human relationships. One heartwarming element though is the recognition he received at the end of his life, and the way that seemed to transform him into being more outgoing and generous.

A useful but deeply flawed biography.
Blotner did a prodigious amount of research for this biography.Any later writer who wants to produce a biography of Faulkner will inevitably find himself or herself relying on much of Blotner's work.The reader, however, will not be so grateful.Blotner seems incapable of distinguishing between that which is important and that which is not.It seems as though he has dumped almost everything he learned into this book. And he learned quite a lot.Why we need, for example, to know the namesof everyone Faulkner came into contact with?Finally, Blotner is not a gifted writer; his style is typical of the academic.I can only hope someone writes a shorter, more readable biography of Faulkner someday.

Blotner's compendium of Faulkner's life.
Originally published in two volumes, Joseph L. Blotner's biography of the imminent writer of the American South, William Faulkner, is often touted as THE chronicle of Faulkner's life. Blotner's style is really quite readable. Indeed, this text is so accessible, one must question his accountability on some instances of Faukner's words to friends and loved ones. (Who really remembers what his wife's father said to him on a particular day--famous or not?) All in all, though, this chronicle sits on the top of the biographical heap for the time being. And it probably won't be displaced for many years to come. ... Read more

Product Description
The text of this Norton Critical Edition is that of the corrected edition scrupulously prepared by Noel Polk, whose textual note precedes the text. David Minter’s annotations are designed to assist the reader with obscure words and allusions."Backgrounds" begins with the appendix Faulkner wrote in 1945 and sometimes referred to as another telling of The Sound and the Fury and includes a selection of Faulkner’s letters, excerpts from two Faulkner interviews, a memoir by Faulknerís friend Ben Wasson, and both versions of Faulkner's 1933 introduction to the novel. "Cultural and Historical Contexts" presents four different perspectives on the place of the American South in history. Taken together, these works—by C. Vann Woodward, Richard H. King, Carolyn Porter, and Robert Penn Warren—provide the reader with valuable contexts for understanding the novel. "Criticism" includes seventeen essays on The Sound and the Fury that collectively trace changes in the way we have viewed this novel over the last four decades. The critics are Jean-Paul Sartre, Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, Olga W. Vickery, Cleanth Brooks, Michael Millgate, John T. Irwin, Myra Jehlen, Donald M. Kartiganer, David Minter, Warwick Wadlington, John T. Matthews, Thadious M. Davis, Wesley Morris and Barbara Alverson Morris, Minrose C. Gwin, André Bleikasten, and Philip M. Weinstein. A revised Selected Bibliography is also included. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (24)

Hymn of Praise
This review is for the Norton Critical edition of The Sound and the Fury. These reviews sometimes get attached to various editions so I wanted to make that clear. This review will probably be quite long. This review will also probably be quite boring, which goes along with its inordinate length. For those who are not interested in reading a long, boring review I will preface my review with a brief, one paragraph summary of my review. If anyone is still interested in my longer review they can go on from there.

The Sound and the Fury is both tragic and beautiful; it deals with human loss and the various ways in which human beings attempt to deal with that loss. The style of Faulkner's writing is utterly hypnotic. Faulkner is able to create a fully sensory world (as opposed to a merely pictorial, or visual world). When you are reading it is less like watching a movie and far more like being in a dream. Faulkner is also able to plumb the very depths of the human heart, to illuminate both its momentary joys and its despair. The characters are so full, and utterly human, even, paradoxically, when they are at their most inhuman, we cannot help but relate to them (even Jason in his cruelty). The themes that are explored in this novel are multifarious and profound and do not allow themselves to be easily summed up. The novel is certainly difficult, but it repays the effort that it requires of the reader at least a hundred fold. The essays at the end of the Norton Critical edition are all excellent and extremely helpful at illuminating the themes of Faulkner's novel. I would definitely suggest that anyone who is genuinely interested in this book purchase the Norton Critical edition. To put it simply: buy this book!

Now on to the longer review. The first section is about the story, Faulkner's method of telling the story, and some of the themes of the story. The second section is about Faulkner's writing and its hypnotic powers.

I.

The Sound and the Fury is a novel about the Compson family. The center of the story revolves around the daughter of the family (Caddy) who gets pregnant out of wedlock, quickly finds a husband, and moves away; but as Jean-Paul Sartre observes in his critical essay the novel is not really about `plot' in the ordinary sense. The fact is that almost all of the `plot' of the novel is already in the past. Caddy's desertion of the family is already in the distant past when the novel begins. The novel is really about Caddy's three brothers (Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) and how they each deal with the loss of Caddy and the destruction left in her wake.

The novel is broken into four separate sections. The first three sections are told in a modernist, first-person, stream of consciousness style; each section being told from the standpoint of one of the three brothers. Only in the fourth section does Faulkner himself take over as narrator when he turns his attention on Dilsey the African American servant who lives and works for the Compsons and who has been largely responsible for raising all four children.

Many people are turned off by the first-person stream of consciousness style, finding it to be `difficult', but I don't think this novel could really have been written in any other way; and that is because, as Olga W. Vickery in her essay `The Sound and the Fury: A Study in Perspective' writes, "The consciousness of a character becomes the actual agent illuminating and being illuminated by the central situation...there is no development of either character or plot in the traditional manner" (pg. 279). The central focus of the story is not on the action but on the consciousness of the characters and their reactions to the action, the way that they internalize the action. Each character reacts differently to the central story and their reactions reveal as much about the characters themselves as they do about the action of the story.

The first-person style has some advantages as well for this particular story. It allows Faulkner to reveal the story slowly, and in pieces. I do not want to give the entire story away so I will not summarize it here but if the story had simply been told in a straight-forward narrative fashion it would have been almost completely lacking in dramatic tension and resolution. Taking the first-person perspective allows Faulkner to reveal the story in pieces, like providing individual pieces to a puzzle but out of order, so that the reader is only able to discern the whole picture at the end. This leads to some confusion on the readers part, especially in the beginning, but it also fuels the reader's desire to keep reading.

The first-person style also allows Faulkner to create a much fuller, almost visceral, experience in the reader as opposed to a mere visual representation. We are not simply told how the characters feel from a third person, objective perspective, we actually experience how they feel as we hear their thoughts spinning around in their heads. Quentin's obsession with Caddy, for instance, is not described in a third-person fashion. Faulkner as narrator does not state, "Quentin obsessed over Caddy"; nor does Quentin himself adopt the third-person standpoint in describing his own experience; he does not say, "I was obsessing over Caddy". Rather, we simply hear Quentin's obsessive thoughts about Caddy as they play out in his own fevered consciousness.

Faulkner's writing provides a genuine phenomenological description of each individual characters experience and world. It is clear that the three brothers live in entirely different worlds. Benjy's world is aptly described by Cleanth Brooks as a "confused, blooming buzz" (pg. 290). Quentin's world on the other hand is dreamlike, suffused with light and shadows, and dominated by the image of water; there is no solidity in his world. Jason's world is really the polar opposite of Quentin's. It is entirely matter of fact, dominated by money, practical considerations, and entirely suffused with his own rage and despair.

As many of the critical essays point out the style of the novel is also central to many of its themes. The central theme of Faulkner's novel I believe is the meaning of time, or, to use an overused phrase, the meaning of life. Normally I would not describe a novel's theme as being 'the meaning of life', which is so broad as to be almost empty of meaning, and which could be applied equally to just about every novel or to none; but in this case I think it is actually appropriate. The question is suggested by the title of the novel itself. Does time, and human life, have some transcendent meaning or purpose (Dilsey's beginning and end of time)? Or is it merely a sound and a fury signifying nothing? Is all order merely imposed? The style reflects this theme by refusing to present what in post-modernist lingo might be called a meta-narrative; a narrative that would unify each conflicting perspective and get at `the truth'. Faulkner never presents such a meta-narrative, and thereby refuses to answer the central problem posed by the title of the novel. In this regard Faulkner follows Chekhov who wrote that the task of the artist was not to solve a problem but simply to state it correctly.

A final benefit of the first-person narrative style adopted through most of the novel is that it allows Faulkner to describe the experiences of his characters in minute detail, and to provide details of their experience that are often unimportant from the standpoint of plot. In the middle of an extremely emotional discussion between Quentin and Caddy about Caddy's love for Dalton Ames (told from the point of view of Quentin) Faulkner writes, "when I lifted my hand I could still feel crisscrossed twigs and grass burning into the palm" (pg. 95). Needless to say this little detail is entirely irrelevant to the plot but it creates a kind of thrill of recognition for everyone who has ever had a similar sensation when lifting their hand up from the grass (which should be almost everyone); and it is another example of Faulkner's ability to provide a fully sensory world.

II.

Faulkner's writing style is utterly hypnotic. Much of Faulkner's writing does not make literal sense, which I think frustrates some readers and is a source of some of the `difficulty' of the novel. But the difficulty only arises from the demand for a literal picture.

In Benjy's section, for example, the characters are looking at the bones of their old dog which are lying in a ditch and Faulkner writes, "The ditch came up out of the buzzing grass. The bones rounded out of the black vines" (pg. 23). These two sentences do not make literal sense. Ditches cannot "come up" out of the grass and grass does not "buzz". Similarly Faulkner's description of the bones "rounding out" of the black vines almost gives us the sense that the bones are alive. Faulkner often uses verbs to describe inanimate objects. But if we give up the demand that everything we read should make literal sense we cannot fail to appreciate the beauty of Faulkner's language, or his ability to create a fully sensory world. Who among us has not been out on a hot, sunny summer day and felt the grass "buzzing"?

Another example of Faulkner's ability to use language to evoke the emotional, as well as the literal, aspects of a scene is Quentin's description of his shadow on the water. Faulkner writes, "It twinkled and glinted, like breathing, the float slow like breathing too, and debris half submerged, healing out to the sea and the caverns and the grottoes of the sea" (pg. 57). What possible literal sense can we ascribe to the phrase "healing out to the sea"? The answer is none; and yet we cannot fail to feel the evocative power of the phrase and its relation to Quentin's troubled consciousness.

One final example of Faulkner's ability to create a fully sensory world should suffice. Quentin, on the night that Caddy loses her virginity, runs out of the house in distress and, as Faulkner describes it, "in the gray darkness it smelled of rain and all flower scents the damp warm air released and crickets sawing away in the grass pacing me with a small travelling island of silence" (pg. 94). In reading this passage we do not merely see Quentin running, we smell the rain and the flower scents that have been released by the damp warm air, and we hear the crickets sawing away. We are not watching a movie, we are in a dream.

III.

In conclusion I would simply say there is no other novel quite like The Sound and the Fury.Andre Bleikasten in his essay "The Quest for Eurydice" writes, "with The Sound and the Fury he [Faulkner] came to realize that, far from being the mere expression or reflection of prior experience, writing could be in itself an experience in the fullest sense" (pg. 414). I would say the same thing about reading The Sound and the Fury. Reading The Sound and the Fury is not merely a repetition, or a representation, of an experience; it is an experience in its own right, and it is is one that is well worth having.

-Brian

Worth the hype
Quite good overall, despite a long opening that's intentionally alienating and disjointing. I've previously hear of Faulkner mostly through his legendarily ornate and drawn out prose, but I found that much less alienating than I was expecting. It's slow, grim, features largely unsympathetic characters and on a sentence to sentence level I did find the prose less than fully compelling. Yet, once I struggled in past the first fifty pages I found it quite engaging and interesting. There's a type of momentum inscribed in it that made it very compelling to follow through, a way the character viewpoints and their myriad failings became fascianting to follow through.

It was kind of a strange experience, and helped break down some preconceptions I had about the "Great Literature". I expect to find this kind of effect--not loving any single part of a book but feel compelled to keep going by the sheer energy of the pace and je ne sais quoi readability--in things trashier or "lower brow". Stephen King practically defines this element for me--in his good stuff there's still lots of plot holes and problems in characterization that I would rip apart in isolation, but while reading I have no desire to do anything but keep going through to follow up on what happens. It's not exactly the same effect here with Faulkner, but somehow it's not entirely dissimilar--amidst a dense and often confusing process of bitter character conflicts it made a very intense experience that ultimately qualified as a page turner.

One element the story benefited from was its ruthlessness, the way it put on the consquences to its relationships, characters and larger society of existential dysfunctions. It benefits from being intimate but also unsympathetic to its cast, giving a sort of tragic fallout that feels cold and yet not sadistic by the author. For all that the story was hardly perfect--the sort of Stylistic Suck of the opening ninety pages clearly played a point yet seemed to outrun its purpose, and I found the ending drifted away from my investment in the situation. Nevertheless, it stands as a major creative accomplishment on Faulkner's part.

As for the larger insights gained from the work--I'm not entirely sure how much that's new and in depth there is. The corrosive environment of racism over multiple generations, the way idealistic naivete and brutal realism both prove unworkable, the slow decline of physical position subsequent to lose of grandeur and belief in oneself. Fairly interesting concepts but not breathtakingly new, and I think most of any specific theme I've seen done more effectively elsewhere. In terms of the book teaching anything substantially new about the human condition or its specific faded American south embodiment I can't commit to that, but it's a text that I'll need to think through, cross-examine and possibly reread at some point before I'll come to a sweeping judgement. It does make me interested in reading more of Faulkner's other works, and gives a bit of renewed appreciation for the value of some of the 'great Western canon' which after Jane Eyre and Moby Dick was flagging a little.

Similar to and better than: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Similar to and worse than: Beloved by Toni Morrison

"The Sound and the Fury"
I really enjoyed "The Sound and the Fury." Faulkner always impresses me with his skills in speech and his ability to change his style to fit a character's personality or mental state, even when it involves a lot of jumping around from time to time. I also enjoyed how this book fits with "Absalom, Absalom!"-- how some of the characters are filled out between the two books and one gets to see what happens to them before and after each of the books.

Form fits meaning
With concrete poetry, or "shape poems," the form fits the meaning. In other words, the look of the poem tells you something about the poem's intended meaning.

Similarly, in the classic, The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner artfully uses the novel's form to deepen the meaning of the whole story. The story follows Benjy Compson, a boy/man with severe cognitive impairments, and his family. By reading the story through his disjointed voice first, the reader feels a bit lost just as Benjy feels amongst the confusing existence that is his family. In piecing together the Compson tragedy, the reader recognizes the complexity of their situation and the convoluted helplessness of everything. Powerful symbolism emerges, like the muddying of Caddy's underwear in connection to her future scandals.

Absolutely brilliant. This is one of those books that humbles you if you ever wish to write a book: How can one possibly compare? But at the same time, Faulkner himself admitted that his narrative could not fully capture his meaning. Once again, words fail to suffice but yet stand as the necessary compromise when something is still needed to allow for expression.


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The Sound and the Fury Review
reasonably timed delivery, didnt know just how used the product really was (not that i care, it just would have been nice to know about all the mark-ups) ... Read more

Product Description
Emory University professor Sally Wolff has carried on a fifty-year tradition of leading students on expeditions to "Faulkner country" in and around Oxford, Mississippi. Not long ago, she decided to invite alumni on one of these field trips. One response to the invitation surprised her: "I can't go on the trip. But I knew William Faulkner." They were the words of Dr. Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, and in talking with Wolff he revealed that as a child in the 1930s and 1940s he did indeed know Faulkner quite well. His father and Faulkner maintained a close friendship for many years, going back to their shared childhood, but the fact of their friendship has been unrecognized because the two men saw much less of each other after the early years of their marriages. In Ledgers of History, Wolff recounts her conversations with Dr. Francisco known to Faulkner as "Little Eddie" and reveals startling sources of inspiration for Faulkner's most famous works.

Dr. Francisco grew up at McCarroll Place, his family's 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 Faulkner's fiction.

Faulkner also displayed an absorbing interest in a seven-volume diary kept by Dr. Francisco's 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 Leak's life, but most of the diary concerns business transactions, including the buying and selling of slaves and the building of a plantation home. During his visits over the course of decades, Francisco recalls, Faulkner spent many hours poring over these volumes, often taking notes. Wolff has discovered that Faulkner apparently drew some of the most important material in several of his greatest works, including Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, at least in part, from the diary.

Through Dr. Francisco's vivid childhood recollections, Ledgers of History offers a compelling portrait of the future Nobel laureate near the midpoint of his legendary career and also charts a significant discovery that will inevitably lead to revisions in historical and critical scholarship on Faulkner and his writings. ... Read more

Product Description
Vintage Books a Division of Random House Edition September 1966 Drawings by Edward Shenton Publisher's Note: The text of this edition of The unvanquished has been reproduced photographically from, and is therefore identical with, a copy of the first printing. Publication date was February 15, 1938. Set in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Faulkner's tenth book, The Unvanquished, focuses on the Sartoris family, who with their code of personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old South's traditions. Here the reader will meet Colonel Sartoris, the head of the family; his young son Bayard who finds an alternative to bloodshed; Ringo, a perceptive black child who is considered part of the family; independent, obstinate Cousin Drusilla who exchanges her dresses for a uniform; and Granny, the matriarch. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A tribute to the tenacity of the human spirit
Set in the old South in the finishing years of the Civil War, this novel follows members of one family, and in particular Bayard Sartoris,as they struggle and try to prevail under the circumstances where most of the prevailing social and personal relations are constantly challenged and even permanently overturned. The writing is quintessential Faulkner, with all particularities of southern dialect and narrative that tries to stay close to the protagonists' mental musings. The story is remarkable and intriguing in that the interpersonal relations between different characters aren neither predictable nor straightforward. In particular it eschews facile delineation between various parties in the war, and no individual fits into a stereotypical category. Sometimes the closest friendships are between those who should be the worst of enemies, and at other occasions those whom you regarded to be close confidants that in the end betray you. These are in fact all too familiar circumstances in most of our lives and in all generations. It's what makes Faulkner's novels so timeless and valuable to read.

Southern society
The Unvanquished is an excellent book, which depicts life in the South during and after the Civil War.The title means "the undefeated or the unconquered," and Faulkner expounds on this topic.One by one,the characters are defeated by either disillusionment, selfishness, orvainity ,and only one character withstands the terrible effects of the war:Bayard.Faulker does a remarkable job depicting the emotions ofSoutherners during this time and uses great imagery. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Good service, but...
I would say that your service is fantastically good.
But, it seem to be not worth the value to have this book in the price which is very high for me.
I mean the price for the shipping, it is double the price of this book!
Probably you could reduce your shipping fee in the future time. ... Read more

Product Description
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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The First and Best Approach to Faulkner's Fiction
We now have back in print once again Faulkner's own words about crucial topics.This volume provides an excellent means to gauge the writer's thinking and should serve as an aid to good judgement.So much Faulkner criticism rides the pet hobby horses of the time and attempts to make Faulkner into the image of the critic.Reading his own words should be a counterbalance to such self-reflexive, myopic readings. The editor is the most scrupulous and best informed Faulkner scholar living today.It is a blessing that he edited this volume.Anything Faulkner wrote would be of interest, but some of these pieces stand right up there with his fiction.His "On Privacy" must take its place alongside the Nobel speech as one of the most important, prophetic documents of the century."The American Dream---What Happened to It?" is a wonderful Southern critique of American materialism and false progress. Faulkner's understanding of the "word sounds" to which he saw Americans relegating the words freedom, liberty, and patriotism is as relevant today as when written 50 years ago.The volume has not dated with time.It's only gotten more incisive and as such is staggeringly impressive. ... Read more

Product Description
The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."


From the Trade Paperback edition. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (131)

Love Faulkner!!
I remember being compelled to read Faulkner's work in high school, and having such a difficult time appreciating the themes in this work. Now I know why I had difficulty with the psychological themes and the character development when I first read. I've re-read, and now with better education and loads of life experience, I have to say this is one of the most engaging, moving works that has impacted my literary interests and life perspective in some respects. I highly encourage!

Points Of Skew
I'm so glad it's not just me that had a tough time reading this book. Actually, I thought Faulkner's earlier "The Sound And The Fury" is a tougher first read, its opening stream of consciousness narrative set in the mind of a simpleton. What 1936's "Absalom, Absalom!" is is a tough second read, making it a harder pill to swallow.

The challenge as I found it was not quite the same as "Sound". There, once you lock into the story, the digressions and the abstract metaphors fall nicely into place. Here, you never quite lock into the story exactly. It follows a man by the name of Sutpen, who carves out a corner of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi for his own. This doesn't endear him to everyone, but he manages to find a bride, settle down, raise two children, and run his spread with the help of some wild Haitian slaves, one of which is his illegitimate daughter. Then comes the Civil War, a tidal wave of change by itself but the least of Thomas Sutpen's problems.

Faulkner makes Sutpen a compelling if mysterious central character. A slaveholder, a hypocrite, a scoundrel, and a cruel "man-horse-demon" as his bitter sister-in-law Rosa Coldfield remembers, Sutpen emerges too as a man of great will and courage. Faulkner observes: "He had been too successful, you see; his was that solitude of contempt and distrust which success brings to him who gained it because he was strong instead of merely lucky."

Miss Rosa is the first tipoff the story isn't going to play out as straightforward as it reads. She's very bitter about Sutpen, as it turns out, in part for good reason, but in part because she's sexually uptight and a snob, mourning a social order Sutpen blew through like tissue paper.

Then there's Quentin Compson, a semester removed from his suicide at Harvard, sharing stories of Sutpen with his jocular Canadian roommate Shreve. Quentin's reminiscence is gentler than Rosa's, but farther removed from the source and tinged with strange melancholy. Maybe the tale of frustrated incest strikes a nerve.

The story doesn't so much come out in pieces as it revolves and gets respun with different accents and emphases. It's a hell of a story, "intense Southern Gothic", like it says in a top review here, with some sudden plot twists unusual for a deep-thought novel. That it goes on in this vein a bit too long, chewing over the same points, is a concern that doesn't melt away when you read the book a second time. Faulkner writes with power and verve, and a poet's flair, but he doesn't use periods nearly enough, overweighting sentences with layers of meaning that go off into corners and bounce back only after stretching a point to breaking.

I may need a couple of more readings before I come around to embracing this novel the same way I did with "The Sound And The Fury". It's not as fun, though some humor does show up, much of it involving the frigid, hypersensitive Rosa. It does provide major insight into the antebellum side of Yoknapatawpha County, with a hard but compelling look at slavery's toll on both black and white that nevertheless is far from the novel's whole story.

The story is great; the telling is problematic if mostly for the best. I'll enjoy re-immersing myself in the enigma that is "Absalom, Absalom!", but if I wind up more confused than ever the next time I read it, I won't be a bit surprised.

A Tough Read
Having read three major works by Faulkner, I never thought Faulkner's prose to be THAT long and convoluted until I read this one. The sentences go on and on, sometimes for half a page, sometimes for an entire page, strung together with clause after clause, requiring the reader to really focus and remember what the subject of the enormous sentence is, though retaining and figuring out what all the clauses are referring to is often times hard to determine as you get lost in that meandering prose that keeps burgeoning like this, sometimes ignoring grammar altogether, sometimes even omitting commas when listing euphuistic obscure poetic little adjectives, punctuated with long parenthetical asides (kind of like this, making it hard to follow the gist of the sentence and causing momentary amnesia whereby the subject of the sentence you tried so hard to retain throughout the long serpentine sentences is almost completely obliterated, sometimes made more complex by an insertion of another parenthetical aside inside of it (like this, you see?) compelling you to go ALL THE WAY back to the beginning and skip the asides altogether and re-read the entire damn thing again to wholly understand what the hell it's saying), the inexplicable semi-colon followed by a dash -- the dash long and imposing, confusing and unnecessary, enclosing more clause after clause in this fashion, severing the subject from everything else that is relevant and instrumental in understanding the sentence as a whole;-- the dash further elongating and compounding the sentence, and all those "not only...but" constructions that are sometimes embedded in or juxtaposed with a negative clause, making it outright ANNOYING (here it is, just CHECK this out) not because they are unpoetic (it can be at times) or stylistically uninteresting (because sometimes - just sometimes - it is) but not only because they are unnecessary and time-consuming to read but because they are just damn confusing!

So if you made it this far in my review and took the time to understand what I said above, you should be able to handle Absalom, Absalom!. Or maybe not. Though there are ups and downs, the entire book is written in this convoluted style. So know what you're getting yourself into before tackling this difficult work.

The story, on the other hand, is interesting. Though 90% of it is really telling and not showing at all, it's generally interesting enough to impel you through the dense, clattered prose and understand the story of a mysterious and impeccable man bent on building a dynasty of his own. In a nutshell, it's a good Shakespearian tragedy (the son destroying the dynasty) with a good Southern twist (in particular, racism).

Overall, despite my parody of his style, I did enjoy the unique experience of reading Faulkner at his most convoluted. An interesting (yet hard) read.

Masterpiece
It is impossible to distill the complex mysteriousness of this great work in a review. Faulkner's 'Absalom, Absalom!' is perhaps his most difficult and experimental novel-a novel that is composed entirely in thickly wrought stream of consciousness prose, with switching perspectives and an a linear chronology. It is too simple to call this great work "Southern Gothic," for it is so foreign in its conception and is a radical departure from the kind of writers Faulkner is normally associated (O'Connor, McCullers, Anderson). Rather, this text is closer to Joyce's 'Ulysses,' in terms of its linguistic complexity and attention to the labyrinthine workings of the mind. This is a novel about ruin, about decay, about what it means to be a part of a deteriorating empire. It is both political and personal, as all the great tragedies are. Through an inspired interplay of interior voice and secondary hearsay, Faulkner creates the story of Henry Sutpen and the gradual decline of his once prestigious family. This is a novel about slavery, about incest and miscegenation. It is American in its content in only the most horrifying ways. It is an incomparable literary achievement.

difficult read
Greatest American novelist who has influenced generations of writers all over the world. This is perhaps the most difficult of his novels. To the inexperienced reader, some of the difficulties are insurmountable. But if one perseveres, one will discover why many critics consider this to be Faulkner's greatest novel.
Of the many difficulties is his style. The recursive style is compounded by long sentences; clause piled upon clause, adjectives upon adjectives. Whoever said that adjectives are bad should see it manipulated by the master. Many grammatical gems are left to be uncovered.
The narration is the most unique in modern fiction. By the end of the first chapter the most important events of the entire story is already mentioned. Subsequent chapters then narrate individual episodes of the general story. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Best of Both Worlds
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.

... Read more

Product Description
At once an engrossing murder mystery and an unflinching potrait of racial injustice in the Reconstruction South, Intruder in the Dust stands out as a true classic of Southern literature. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (44)

Purchase of an old classic
I had been looking for William Faulkner's "Intruder in the Dust", because I wanted to have Charlie Mallison's quote about Pickett's Charge on file.

The copy sent to me was hard cover, 16th printing of the first edition, in excellent shape, and meets my requirements in every way.

I am totally satisfied.

If it's William Faulkner it must be good.
I read this on my own and have read other works by Faulkner, so I'm not just some innocent student.

On the positive:Faulkner does create good imagery such as the two scenes in the graveyard.I also like that he never tries to explain himself, let's the reader figure it out.The symbolism is OK if you're into that sort of thing.

On the negative:He must have written this while out and out drunk and the editor, publisher and the adoring public make great allowance because this is "William Faulkner".The sentences are not just run-on, but change subjects midstream and simply make no sense.The dialogue is the same as the narrative except for the quotes surrounding it and thus since everyone talks the same, there is not much for characterization.The plot is a simple mystery which depends on timing, coincidence, stupidity and is just unbelievable.

If not for the fame of the author, this book would be forgotton.

On the obligations incurred from eating a plate of collard greens...
... the "owner" of which was a man who said "mister" to whites, but did not really mean it. The meal was served to 12 year old Charles Mallison, after he had fallen in an icy pond, and the server, who didn't mean mister, was Lucas Beauchamp. Four years later the "bill" for those collard greens would come due, and it would be Mallison's actions that would save Beauchamp's life. "Intruder in the Dust" is one of Faulkner's later works, written just after World War II. The perennial themes of his works are exhibited: his examination of life in barely fictional Yoknapatawpha County, whose county seat is Jefferson, (Oxford, MS) and the continued fall-out from America's "original sin," slavery. From Faulkner's majestically southern mansion of Rowan Oaks, he wrote in fear of the "white trash" that surrounded him, so often identified as the Snopes family, but in this novel they are transformed into the Gowries, from "Beat Four." Faulkner's stream-of-consciousness style always challenges the reader to stay engaged, or a vital clue to the story will be missed. And like those slower internet connections, he "backs and fills" his pixels, slowly revealing the entire story. This is also an excellent "mystery" novel; the particular situations involving the grave seem "impossible," but Faulkner makes it all so understandable, masterfully so, in the fullness of time. Faulkner is certainly not for the "fun read" crowd, nor, apparently, based on the reviews posted here, for sophomores in "Advanced Placement" English. I shutter at the thought of how many students have become confirmed non-readers of serious books for the rest of their lives as a result of such classes.

I am an immense fan of Faulkner, and still hope to read or re-read all his works. This time it was a re-read, after 35 or so years, and fortunately, even the first time was not a dreaded school assignment. There remain the wonderful, original descriptive passages that contain nuggets like: "...and forlorn across the long peaceful creep of late afternoon, into the mauve windless dome of dusk..." and "...if there were only some way to efface the clumsy room-devouring carcasses which can be done but the memory which cannot." But on the re-read I noticed Faulkner's "feet of clay." In referring to a patched roof, how much meaning is conveyed by "insolent promptitude," or a lathe's "ineluctable shaft," or "incredulous disbelief"?

But the real "feet of clay" are political, and there is a three page defense of the South's "go slow" policy for granting Blacks equal rights. The passage doesn't work in a literary sense, in that it plops, "cut and pasted," interrupting the dramatic tension of an enthralling mystery. Consider: "...only we (meaning white Southerners) must do it, and we alone without help or interference or even (thank you) advice since only we can if Lucas's equality is to be anything more than its own prisoner inside an impregnable barricade of the direct heirs of the victory of 1861-1865..." James Baldwin, in "Nobody Knows My Name," in his chapter entitled "Faulkner and Desegregation," offers the seminal critique of such an attitude: "After more than two hundred years in slavery and ninety years of quasi-freedom, it is hard to think very highly of William Faulkner's advice to `go slow.' `They don't mean go slow,' Thurgood Marshall is reported to have said, `they mean don't go.'"

Upon the re-read I was also struck by how derivative Harper Lee's classic book, "To Kill a Mockingbird" is, down to the two different men, both sitting in the doorway of the jailhouse, to prevent a lynching, as well as even the mockingbird! It is a point another reviewer made, but I had never realized it before, nor seen it in a critique of Lee's work.

Faulkner may be most associated with black-white relations, but he also has something to say about male-female relations. Consider: "...just enough dirt to hide the body temporarily from sight with something of that frantic desperation of the wife flinging her peignoir over the lover's forgotten glove..." or "I am fifty-plus years old,' his uncle said. `I spent the middle fifteen of them fumbling beneath skirts. My experience was that few of them were interested in love or sex either. They wanted to be married.'"

It pains me to knock a star from a Nobel-prize winning "idol," but the "feet of clay" are most certainly there.

Stream-of-Confusion
This novel is, in form, a thriller with a classic thriller plot- the fight to prove the innocence of a man accused of a crime he did not commit. (Alfred Hitchcock used this plot in a number of his films, and "Intruder in the Dust" was itself made into a very good film by Clarence Brown in 1949, only a year after its publication). Faulkner takes this basic plot and uses it to explore the problem of racism in America's Deep South; Harper Lee was later to take a similar plot, and use it for a similar purpose, in "To Kill a Mockingbird".

The book is set in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County and its capital, Jefferson, based upon the real Lafayette County and Faulkner's own home town of Oxford. The innocent man wrongly accused is Lucas Beauchamp, an elderly, widowed black farmer. Although Beauchamp is honest and respectable, he is resented by many whites because he refuses to "behave like a nigger", that is to say behave in a servile manner. When a white man named Vinson Gowrie is shot dead, Beauchamp is accused of the crime. Gowrie was from Beat Four, a wild, hilly district of the county, whose white inhabitants are noted for their lawless ways and their ingrained prejudices against blacks. A mob, mostly members of Gowrie's extended family, gathers in Jefferson, threatening to break into the jail and lynch Beauchamp.

The story is told through the eyes of Charles Mallison, the sixteen-year-old nephew of Gavin Stevens, the relatively liberal white lawyer who acts for Beauchamp. Charles, who regards himself as being in Beauchamp's debt ever since, four years earlier, the old man rescued him after he fell in a stream, sets out to prove that Beauchamp did not fire the fatal shot. Together with his black friend Aleck and Miss Habersham, an elderly spinster (did Faulkner derive her name from Dickens' Miss Havisham?) he makes the dangerous body to Beat Four to exhume the body of the murdered man- and makes a surprising discovery.

Racial issues play an important part in Faulkner's work; indeed, it would probably be difficult for any Southern writer to avoid them altogether. His own views on the topic, however, seem to have been rather mixed. On the one hand he was an anti-racist, regarding the intolerant prejudice of many white Southerners as an affront to both decency and rationality. On the other hand, he was himself a proud Southerner, conscious of his family's Confederate heritage; his great-grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (thus spelt), had been a Confederate hero in the Civil War. In this novel Faulkner himself seems to adopt what might be called a neo-Confederate position, believing that, if the South could not be an independent, sovereign state it should at least form a culturally autonomous unit within the USA and have the right to deal with its own problems without interference from the North. He devotes several pages of the novel to his thesis that attempts by outsiders to combat racism in the south had actually been counter-productive and that black Southerners would never achieve equality until white Southerners were allowed to address the issue on their own terms.

The novel was written in the late forties, before the rise of the Civil Rights movement, and I think that Faulkner was wrong about race. The large-scale exodus of rural Southern blacks to Northern industrial cities in the first half of the twentieth century meant that race relations could no longer (if indeed they ever could) be thought of as solely a Southern issue. Since 1948 race relations in America have seen an immense change for the better; as I write this in October 2008 it seems quite likely that next month Barack Obama will not only be elected America's first black President but will also carry several Southern states. This change would not have been possible without the Civil Rights movement and the active involvement of Northerners, both black and white, and of the institutions of the Federal government.

Despite my disagreements with him, I nevertheless found Faulkner's analysis of the South's racial problems a stimulating and thought-provoking one. The characters are, for the most part, memorable and powerfully drawn. I did not, however, altogether enjoy this book, largely because of the eccentricities of the prose style that the author adopts here, a prose style characterised by long, rambling (and often syntactically disorganised) sentences, sometimes extending over several pages. He also has a weakness for obscure vocabulary items.

Faulkner was, presumably, aiming at the sort of stream-of-consciousness style he had used to good effect in other, better, novels, such as "As I Lay Dying". This style can be a valuable tool for showing us the world through the eyes of a fictional character or, in the case of "As I Lay Dying" which uses first-person multiple-narrator technique, through the eyes of a string of different characters. When stream-of-consciousness is used to represent the writer's own authorial voice, it becomes much less effective. "Intruder in the Dust" is a third-person narrative, and, although Charles is the central character, we are not always certain if it is his voice we are hearing, or the author's. The effect is less stream-of-consciousness than stream-of-confusion. As a result of this uncertainty, and of his often impenetrable syntax, the author's train of thought is in places difficult to follow, which means that, despite its interesting themes, "Intruder in the Dust" is not as effective a book as it could have been.

Difficult Read
This story is one of the most difficult stories I have read thus far. I am supposed to summarize the story for an English Majors course; but because the sentences are so long and tangled, I keep losing track of which character is being talked about. I have read and reread the story, but still have difficulty summarizing the story. The excruciatingly long paragraphs are what makes it so difficult to follow. Use caution when reading this story. ... Read more