Contributions by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Jordan Burke, Rebecca Bennett Clark, James C. Cobb, Anna Creadick, Colin Dayan, Wai Chee Dimock, Sarah E. Gardner, Hannah Godwin, Brooks E. Hefner, Andrew B. Leiter, Sean McCann, Conor Picken, Natalie J. Ring, Calvin Schermerhorn, and Jay Watson William Faulkner remains a historian’s writer. A distinguished roster of historians are drawn to him as a fellow historian, a shaper of narrative reflections on the meaning of the past; as a historiographer, a theorist and dramatist of the fraught enterprise of doing history; and as a historical figure himself, especially following his mid-century emergence as a public intellectual after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. This volume brings together historians and literary scholars to explore the many facets of Faulkner’s relationship to history: the historical contexts of his novels and stories; his explorations of the historiographic imagination; his engagement with historical figures from both the regional and national past; his influence on professional historians; his pursuit of alternate modes of temporal awareness; and the histories of print culture that shaped the production, reception, and criticism of Faulkner’s work. Contributors draw on the history of development in the Mississippi Valley, the construction of Confederate memory, the history and curriculum of Harvard University, twentieth-century debates over police brutality and temperance reform, the history of modern childhood, and the literary histories of antislavery writing and pulp fiction to illuminate Faulkner’s work. Others in the collection explore the meaning of Faulkner’s fiction for such professional historians as C. Vann Woodward and Albert Bushnell Hart. In these ways and more, Faulkner and History offers fresh insights into one of the most persistent and long-recognized elements of the Mississippian’s artistic vision.

William Faulkner more than any other writer is intimately associated with the South about which he wrote. This book reveals the man and his family and the ways in which southern culture and his own life were wound around one another in his greatest works.

In this companion volume to William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks takes an in-depth look at Faulkner's early poetry and prose as well as his five non-Yoknapatawpha novels -- Soldiers Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable. Brooks also offers relevant clarification of some of his earlier interpretations of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notably in the case of Faulkner that have been challenged -- most notable in the case of Absalom, Absalom!, which he considers Faulkner's greatest novel. Recognizing that the creative and imaginative center of Faulkner's art is Yoknapatawpha County, Brooks examines the merits of each of the works set beyond these boundaries and explores how these writings complement Faulkner as an artist. He sheds light on the literary sources that influenced Faulkner's early work and the technical innovations and general themes Faulkner was to develop in his later writing. The notes and appendixes with which Brooks concludes Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond serve only to amplify this comprehensive study.

By the end of volume 1 of The Life of William Faulkner ("A filling, satisfying feast for Faulkner aficianados"— Kirkus), the young Faulkner had gone from an unpromising, self-mythologizing bohemian to the author of some of the most innovative and enduring literature of the century, including The Sound and the Fury and Light in August. The second and concluding volume of Carl Rollyson’s ambitious biography finds Faulkner lamenting the many threats to his creative existence. Feeling, as an artist, he should be above worldly concerns and even morality, he has instead inherited only debts—a symptom of the South’s faded fortunes—and numerous mouths to feed and funerals to fund. And so he turns to the classic temptation for financially struggling writers—Hollywood. Thus begins roughly a decade of shuttling between his home and family in Mississippi—lifeblood of his art—and the backlots of the Golden Age film industry. Through Faulkner’s Hollywood years, Rollyson introduces such personalities as Humphrey Bogart and Faulkner’s long-time collaborator Howard Hawks, while telling the stories behind films such as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. At the same time, he chronicles with great insight Faulkner's rapidly crumbling though somehow resilient marriage and his numerous extramarital affairs--including his deeply felt, if ultimately doomed, relationship with Meta Carpenter. (In his grief over their breakup, Faulkner—a dipsomaniac capable of ferocious alcoholic binges—received third-degree burns when he passed out on a hotel-room radiator.) Where most biographers and critics dismiss Faulkner’s film work as at best a necessary evil, at worst a tragic waste of his peak creative years, Rollyson approaches this period as a valuable window on his artistry. He reveals a fascinating, previously unappreciated cross-pollination between Faulkner’s film and literary work, elements from his fiction appearing in his screenplays and his film collaborations influencing his later novels—fundamentally changing the character of late-career works such as the Snopes trilogy. Rollyson takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the composition of Absalom, Absalom!, widely considered Faulkner’s masterpiece, as well as the film adaptation he authored—unproduced and never published— Revolt in the Earth. He reveals how Faulkner wrestled with the legacy of the South—both its history and its dizzying racial contradictions—and turned it into powerful art in works such as Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust. Volume 2 of this monumental work rests on an unprecedented trove of research, giving us the most penetrating and comprehensive life of Faulkner and providing a fascinating look at the author's trajectory from under-appreciated "writer's writer" to world-renowned Nobel laureate and literary icon. In his famous Nobel speech, Faulkner said what inspired him was the human ability to prevail. In the end, this beautifully wrought life shows how Faulkner, the man and the artist, embodies this remarkable capacity to endure and prevail.

Contributions by Tim Armstrong, Edward A. Chappell, W. Ralph Eubanks, Amy A. Foley, Michael Gorra, Sherita L. Johnson, Andrew B. Leiter, John T. Matthews, Julie Beth Napolin, Erin Penner, Stephanie Rountree, Julia Stern, Jay Watson, and Randall Wilhelm In 1930, the same year he moved into Rowan Oak, a slave-built former plantation home in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, William Faulkner published his first work of fiction that gave serious attention to the experience and perspective of an enslaved individual. For the next two decades, Faulkner repeatedly returned to the theme of slavery and to the figures of enslaved people in his fiction, probing the racial, economic, and political contours of his region, nation, and hemisphere in work such as The Sound and the Fury; Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!; and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner and Slavery is the first collection to address the myriad legacies of African chattel slavery in the writings and personal history of one of the twentieth century’s most incisive authors on US slavery and the long ordeal of race in the Americas. Contributors to the volume examine the constitutive links among slavery, capitalism, and modernity across Faulkner’s oeuvre. They study how the history of slavery at the University of Mississippi informs writings like Absalom, Absalom! and trace how slavery’s topologies of the rectilinear grid or square run up against the more reparative geography of the oval in Faulkner’s narratives. Contributors explore how the legacies of slavery literally sound and resound across centuries of history, and across multiple novels and stories in Faulkner’s fictional county of Yoknapatawpha, and they reveal how the author’s remodeling work on his own residence brought him into an uncomfortable engagement with the spatial and architectural legacies of chattel slavery in north Mississippi. Faulkner and Slavery offers a timely intervention not only in the critical study of the writer’s work but in ongoing national and global conversations about the afterlives of slavery and the necessary work of antiracism.

"William Faulkner (1897-1962) produced such enduring novels as The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and As I Lay Dying, as well as many short stories. His works continue to be a source of interest to scholars and students of literature, and the immense amount of criticism about the Nobel-prize winner continues to grow. Bassett provides an annotated listing of commentary in English on William Faulkner since the late 1980s. This volume dedicates its sections to book-length studies of Faulkner, commentaries on individual novels and short works, criticism covering multiple works, biographical and bibliographical sources, and other materials such as book reviews, doctoral dissertations, and brief commentaries. This bibliography provides a list of all significant recent commentary on Faulkner, and the annotations direct readers to those materials of most interest to them." -- From back of book.

This history of Lafayette County, Mississippi, uses William Faulkner's rich fictional portrait of a place and its people to illuminate the past. From the arrival of Europeans in Chickasaw Indian territory in 1540 to Faulkner's death in 1962, Doyle chronicles more than four centuries of local history. 27 illustrations. 3 maps.

Contributions by Eric Gary Anderson, Melanie R. Anderson, Jodi A. Byrd, Gina Caison, Robbie Ethridge, Patricia Galloway, LeAnne Howe, John Wharton Lowe, Katherine M. B. Osburn, Melanie Benson Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Jay Watson From new insights into the Chickasaw sources and far-reaching implications of Faulkner’s fictional place-name “Yoknapatawpha,” to discussions that reveal the potential for indigenous land-, family-, and story-based methodologies to deepen understanding of Faulkner’s fiction (including but not limited to the novels and stories he devoted explicitly to Native American topics), the eleven essays of this volume advance the critical analysis of Faulkner’s Native South and the Native South’s Faulkner. Critics push beyond assessments of the historical accuracy of his Native representations and the colonial hybridity of his Indian characters. Essayists turn instead to indigenous intellectual culture for new models, problems, and questions to bring to Faulkner studies. Along the way, readers are treated to illuminating comparisons between Faulkner’s writings and the work of a number of Native American authors, filmmakers, tribal leaders, and historical figures. Faulkner and the Native South brings together Native and non-Native scholars in a stimulating and often surprising critical dialogue about the indigenous wellsprings of Faulkner’s creative energies and about Faulkner’s own complicated presence in Native American literary history.