Talking About William Faulkner

Author : Sally Wolff
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807120309
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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

Author : Carl Rollyson
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813943833
Total Pages : 713 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Life of William Faulkner written by Carl Rollyson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 713 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged South—half backwoods, half defeated empire—transforming his corner of Mississippi into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and bestowing on the world some of the most revolutionary and enduring literature of the twentieth century. The personal story behind the work has fascinated readers nearly as much as the great novels, but Faulkner has remained elusive despite numerous biographies that have attempted to decipher his private life and his wild genius. In an ambitious biography that will encompass two volumes, Carl Rollyson has created a life of Faulkner for the new millennium. Rollyson has drawn on an unprecedented amount of material to present the richest rendering of Faulkner yet published. In addition to his own extensive interviews, Rollyson consults the complete—and never fully shared—research of pioneering Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner, who discarded from his authorized biography substantial findings in order to protect the Faulkner family. Rollyson also had unrivaled access to the work of Carvel Collins, whose decades-long inquiry produced one of the greatest troves of primary source material in American letters. This first volume follows Faulkner from his formative years through his introduction to Hollywood. Rollyson sheds light on Faulkner’s unpromising, even bewildering youth, including a gift for tall tales that blossomed into the greatest of literary creativity. He provides the fullest portrait yet of Faulkner’s family life, in particular his enigmatic marriage, and offers invaluable new insight into the ways in which Faulkner’s long career as a screenwriter influenced his iconic novels. Integrating Faulkner’s screenplays, fiction, and life, Rollyson argues that the novelist deserves to be reread not just as a literary figure but as a still-relevant force, especially in relation to issues of race, sexuality, and equality. The culmination of years of research in archives that have been largely ignored by previous biographers, The Life of William Faulkner offers a significant challenge and an essential contribution to Faulkner scholarship. .

Author : Michael Gorra
Publisher : Liveright Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1631491717
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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

Author : Sally Wolff
Publisher : LSU Press
ISBN 13 : 9780807137789
Total Pages : 240 pages
Book Rating : 4.82/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ledgers of History written by Sally Wolff and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : William Faulkner
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 144342319X
Total Pages : 25 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book That Evening Sun written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quentin Compson narrates the story of his family’s African-American washerwoman, Nancy, who fears that her husband will murder her because she is pregnant with a white-man’s child. The events in the story are witnessed by a young Quentin and his two siblings, Caddy and Jason, who do not fully understand the adult world of race and class conflict that they are privy to. Although primarily known for his novels, William Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.

Author : Joseph Fruscione
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780814252338
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Faulkner and Hemingway written by Joseph Fruscione and published by . This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Illustrates how Faulkner and Hemingway's artistic paths and performed masculinities clashed as the authors measured themselves against each other and engendered a mutual psychological influence.

Author : William Faulkner
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 100 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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

Author : William Faulkner
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 1443428868
Total Pages : 270 pages
Book Rating : 4.66/5 ( download)

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Download or read book As I Lay Dying written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-06-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, As I Lay Dying tells the story of the dysfunctional Bundren family as they set out to fulfill Addie Bundren’s dying wish. Told by fifteen narrators, including Jewel, Cash, Darl and Dewey Dell, As I Lay Dying uses stream of consciousness to unveil each character’s motivations for carrying out Addie’s wish, along with a multitude of lies they have been hiding from each other. As I Lay Dying was Faulkner’s fifth novel and is included in the Modern Library’s list of 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel inspired a number of critically-acclaimed books including Graham Swift’s Last Orders and Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body: A Novel. The title, which inspired the name of the Grammy-nominated band As I Lay Dying, is derived from Homer’s The Odyssey. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.

Author : William Faulkner
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 030779198X
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Town written by William Faulkner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the second volume of Faulkner’s trilogy about the Snopes family, his symbol for the grasping, destructive element in the post-bellum South. Like its predecessor The Hamlet, and its successor The Mansion, The Town is completely self-contained, but it gains resonance from being read with the other two. The story of Flem Snopes’ ruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, the book is rich in typically Faulknerian episodes of humor and of profundity.

Author : William Faulkner
Publisher : Harper Collins
ISBN 13 : 1443423203
Total Pages : 25 pages
Book Rating : 4.05/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Bear written by William Faulkner and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 25 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Isaac McCaslin is obsessed with hunting down Old Ben, a mythical bear that wreaks havoc on the forest. After this feat is accomplished, Isaac struggles with his relationship to nature and to the land, which is complicated when he inherits a large plantation in Yoknapatawapha County. “The Bear” is included in William Faulkner’s novel, Go Down, Moses. Although primarily known for his novels, Faulkner wrote in a variety of formats, including plays, poetry, essays, screenplays, and short stories, many of which are highly acclaimed and anthologized. Like his novels, many of Faulkner’s short stories are set in fictional Yoknapatawapha County, a setting inspired by Lafayette County, where Faulkner spent most of his life. His first short story collection, These 13 (1931), includes many of his most frequently anthologized stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves" and "That Evening Sun." HarperCollins brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperCollins short-stories collection to build your digital library.