Word: faulknerisms
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Flem Snopes and his rootless clan are a Faulkner creation that rose up and walked off the page. Throughout the South today, "Snopes" is a derisive epithet for men ranging from leading demagogic politicians down to the Klansman next door. Snopeses pop up early in Yoknapatawpha County, but unlike most other Faulkner characters they seem to have no ancestors-at least not from Mississippi. Flem's father, the vicious Ab Snopes, wore neither blue uniform nor grey, but was a carrion crow on Civil War battlefields...
...touched off the Birmingham, Ala., bus boycott one day in 1955 when she refused to stand up for a white passenger because her feet hurt. Lucas Beauchamp catches to perfection the abrasive, unbending independence of a man like James Meredith, who integrated the University of Mississippi three months after Faulkner's death...
...novels also share another trait that seizes and deeply involves the reader: each is an extended and agonized search for truth. Faulkner at his best thus belongs with novelists like Proust or Dostoevsky. This trait in part explains Faulkner's enormous popularity abroad, particularly in such places as Japan and France, where the state of the soul is considered far more absorbing than sociology-least of all the sociology of a remote region such as the U.S. South. There they have viewed Faulkner's work as a series of morality tales, and long before the U.S. did, they...
Visible Conflict. Faulkner's overt, publicly voiced views on the Southern crisis are relatively rare and ambiguous. He was a writer above all, and perhaps he did not know what he thought until he had written it. His novels are a kind of diary of his own tormented inner struggle, an inadvertent self-portrait of a man making visible his own conflict of loyalties and good will...
...Faulkner also kept himself one of the least public of writers. He rarely gave interviews, and when he did he was frequently gruff and uncooperative. He secluded himself in a classical Southern house that was an almost defiant backward clutch toward a lost way of life. He often refused to answer the phone. When the movie made from Intruder in the Dust was given its world premiere in Oxford, he announced, to the producers' horror, that he would not attend. He finally did appear at the theater only because someone had reached an aunt of his in Memphis...