Word: faulkner
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...William Faulkner had a thing about privacy. "If I were reincarnated," he once told a friend, "I'd want to come back as a buzzard. Nothing hates him, or envies him, or wants him, or needs him; he's never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything...
...Because Faulkner only rarely gave interviews about his work, never permitted journalists to pry into his private life, and refused to play the celebrity, the press made him something of a myth-laden enigma during his lifetime. The oddest myth of all is that Faulkner was a recluse in his classical Southern mansion in Oxford, Miss., and found company only in countless demijohns of bourbon while he wrenched out his primeval and difficult prose...
Uneven Talents. As this collection proves, Faulkner was particularly busy from 1950 onward. Far from being a recluse, he reported on the Kentucky Derby for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, wrote on a variety of subjects for other magazines, and took a lively interest in public affairs. But just as his recently republished verse, The Marble Faun and A Green Bough (TIME, Nov. 26), showed that he was not much of a poet, this collection indicates that he possessed woefully uneven talents as a speaker, essayist and letter writer...
Readers who have fought their way through the syntactic quagmires of Faulkner's fiction will be mildly surprised to find that he could sometimes be straightforward and lucid, as in his Nobel Prize Speech of 1950 ("I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail"). Far less inspiring, however, was Faulkner's commencement address to the 1953 graduating class at the Pine Manor Junior College in Wellesley, Mass. The talk is so gauze-wrapped with mystical abstractions about man and his condition that the poor students must have stumbled away from it in a stupor...
Tame Squirrels. Actually, Faulkner was at his best when he was informal. He wrote letters to the editor of the Oxford (Miss.) Eagle on such matters as a campaign to legalize the sale of beer ("Yours for a freer Oxford, where publicans can be law-abiding publicans six days a week"), he reported that a hit-run driver had killed his bird dog ("His name was Pete. He was just a dog, a 15-month-old pointer"), and he took an ad to thank the mayor for removing a sign that had been posted near his gate. In a tartly...