William Faulkner emerged from the ravaged Southhalf backwoods, half defeated empiretransforming 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 completeand never fully sharedresearch 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.
Carl Rollyson, Professor Emeritus at Baruch College, The City University of New York, has published numerous biographies of literary figures such as Sylvia Plath, Susan Sontag, Lillian Hellman, Amy Lowell, Rebecca West, and Norman Mailer. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion, and the Washington Post.
A country bitterly divided between two political parties. Populist mobs rising in support of a
reactionary rabble-rouser. Foreign interference in the political process. Strained relations between Britain and Europe. These are not recent headlinesthey are from the year 1710, when ...
Winner of Best Guidebook Award 2018 from the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural
HistoriansWhile Savannah's famous urban plan is rightly renowned in many studies of urban history, what brings streams of tourists and architects to the city, and ...
The architectural history of Texas spans more than 300 years of European settlement and 10,000
years of habitation by native peoples. The incredibly diverse natural landscape and equally varied built environment has produced an architectural heritage of national and international ...
From Milwaukee to Madison, Racine to Eau Claire, La Crosse to Sheboygan, and scores of
places in between, tradition and progressivism have shaped Wisconsin's architectural landscape. This latest volume in the Society of Architectural Historians' Buildings of the United States ...
Over his distinguished career as a European intellectual historian and cultural critic, Martin Jay has
explored a variety of major themes: the Frankfurt School, the exile of German intellectuals in America during the Nazi era, Western Marxism, the denigration of ...
These essays demonstrate that American political culture was fashioned in a dialogue between Federalists and
Jeffersonians. They portray an active Federalist coalition that offered a vibrant intellectual and political alternative throughout the era of the early republic. Cutting across boundaries ...
In much the same way that views of the earth from the Apollo missions in
the late 1960s and early 1970s led indirectly to the inauguration of Earth Day and the modern environmental movement, the dawn of aviation ushered in ...
In 1971 William Kelso happened almost by chance on an archaeological find that would open
a new door on the rural history of colonial Tidewater Virginia. Erosion had revealed a brick well shaft in a cliff on the James River; ...