William Faulkner

by Minter, David L.

• ISBN13: 9780801857478
• ISBN10: 0801857473
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-08-28
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

Summary

"Any future Faulkner biographer--and there will be others, rest assured of that--will find it difficult to surpass what Minter has accomplished."--Jonathan Yardley In this highly acclaimed biography, David Minter draws upon a wealth of material, including the novelist's essays, interviews, published and unpublished letters, as well as his poems, stories, and novels, to illuminate the close relationship between the flawed life and the artistic achievement of one of twentieth-century America's most complex literary figures. In the process, he reveals a Faulkner who is powerful, vulnerable, real--every bit as fascinating as the characters he created. Anyone who has ever tarried in Yoknapatawpha County will find this a sensitive and readable account of the novelist's struggles in art and life. In his new preface, Minter locates his biography in relation to the changes in the literary critical landscape during the 1980s and discusses its departures from New Critical tenets about the relationship between authors' lives and their works. "An excellent book... It sets forth, often very sensitively, the elements of Faulkner's personality that make the fictional universe of Yoknapatawpha County assume the forms it takes in the major novels."--Louis D. Rubin, Jr. "One emerges from reading [Minter's book] with a fresh understanding of Faulkner both as man and writer, with feelings of sympathy and, even more, admiration."--Richard Gray, Times Higher Education Supplement "The great virtue of David Minter's book is that he knows that the question of who a man was is less interesting than that of whom he wished to become... It is in the poems and the novels that we can trace the self to which Faulkner aspired."--Lachlan Mackinnon, Times Literary Supplement

Author Biography

David Minter is Libbie Shern Moody Professor of English at Rice University. He is the author of The Interpreted Design as a Structural Principle in American Prose and A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner.

Table of Contents

Preface, 1997	vii	(5)
Preface: The Writing of a Life	xii	(5)
Acknowledgments	xvii
ONE A Small Boy and a Giant in the Earth, 1897-1918	1	(23)
TWO The Great War and Beyond, 1918-1924	24	(22)
THREE Versions of the Artist, 1925-1926	46	(24)
FOUR The Great Discovery, 1927	70	(21)
FIVE The Self's Own Lamp, 1928-1929	91	(22)
SIX Recognitions, 1929-1931	113	(24)
SEVEN Three Trips to Babylon, 1932-1936	137	(28)
EIGHT Two Gestures of Gianthood, 1936-1942	165	(27)
NINE The Dark Years and Beyond, 1942-1950	192	(28)
TEN The Faces of Fame, 1951-1962	220	(33)
Appendix A: Genealogy	253	(2)
Appendix B: Chronology	255	(5)
Appendix C: Map of Yoknapatawpha Country	260	(1)
Bibliographical Note	261	(6)
Notes	267	(42)
Index	309