Volume 38, Number 5 · March 7, 1991
The Strange Fate of William Faulkner
By Frederick C. Crews
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
The Portable Faulkner
edited by Malcolm Cowley
Penguin, 724 pp., $9.95
Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism
by Lawrence H. Schwartz
University of Tennessee Press, 286 pp., $14.95 (paper)
William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country
by Cleanth Brooks
Yale University Press, (out of print)
On the Prejudices, Predilections, and Firm Beliefs of William Faulkner
by Cleanth Brooks
Louisiana State University Press, 162 pp., $16.95
Faulkner's Country Matters: Folklore and Fable in Yoknapatawpha
by Daniel Hoffman
Louisiana State University Press, 181 pp., $19.95
Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner
by John T. Irwin
Johns Hopkins University Press, 183 pp., $8.95 (paper)
Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities
by John N. Duvall
University of Texas Press, 159 pp., $22.50
Reading Faulkner
by Wesley Morris, by Barbara AlversonWtwith Morris
University of Wisconsin Press, 259 pp., $24.95
Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and Rewriting
by Richard C. Moreland
University of Wisconsin Press, 252 pp., $14.75 (paper)
The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Novels from 'The Sound and the Fury' to 'Light in August'
by André Bleikasten
Indiana University Press, 400 pp., $37.50
Once upon a time, a great American novelist—indeed, the greatest of his century—was languishing in public neglect, critical disdain, and near poverty, reduced to splicing and patching the scripts of other Hollywood screenwriters ('schmucks with typewriters,' as one of their employers famously defined them) to make ends meet. Those who knew the writer's novels, all but one of which were out of print, saw in him only a minor regionalist, an obscurantist, and a macabre sensationalist. One day, however, a discerning critic, awakening to the music of the writer's language and the profundity of his insight, volunteered to assemble a generous sampler that would guide new readers through his admittedly intricate fictional world—a world he had been constructing in stoic isolation for twenty years. And so it came to pass that a major injustice was rectified. Thanks to the critic's efforts, everyone soon perceived the artist in his real stature—a titan of modernism, a Balzacian chronicler of the life and history of his birthplace, and a tragic, compassionate ironist who had affirmed the values of family and community by showing what happens when those values are weakened by callous outsiders.
Review, 7717 words
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