Word: compsons
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Harvard University's particular debt to William Faulkner who died in Oxford, Mississippi on July 6 at the age of 65, would at first seem to be of questionable nature. It is in Cambridge that Quentin Compson takes his life by plunging into the Charles River. Quentin whose monologue forms the second (or third, depending on the edition) section of The Sound and the Fury, doubtless reflects some attributes of the archetypal Harvard student. One can hardly doubt that the philosophical debate on the meaning of time in the few minutes before being late to a nine o'clock lecture...
...story, as the film tells it, is a sort of magnolia-strewn Jane Eyre. The hero (Yul Brynner) is a gloomy and passionate young man. The heroine (Joanne Woodward) is his ward, a gay young sprig on a rotten family tree. The Compsons have been drunk for a couple of generations, and have long since sold their birthright for a mess of corn liquor. The only thing left is the peeling old plantation house, and there the last of the Compsons live on the charity of the hero, who has become a Compson by adoption and is determined to redeem...
...actor in cinema's early days, became one of the highest-paid and fastest-working directors of the silents. At one time Paramount paid him $1,000 a day every day in the year whether he worked or not. The second of his three wives was Actress Betty Compson...
...members of the third generation turned savagely on their parents when they found that the traditions they inherited did not square with the bitter actualities of life. So his books are full of melodrama: the last descendants of old families lie awake in crumbling houses; pompous parents like Mr. Compson deliver half-drunken lectures to their children; elderly spinsters of gentle birth talk hysterical nonsense to impressionable youngsters; young girls creep through the wisteria vines to meet lovers their parents will not accept; young men split their minds trying to make sense of the hodgepodge of Southern traditions, gossip, inaccurate...
Here Author Faulkner plays his last joker, for readers of The Sound and the Fury will recall that Quentin Compson himself has been guilty of incest with his sister, and that he commits suicide while at Harvard as a result...