Word: faulknerisms
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...rich deep black alluvial soil" of Mississippi, Faulkner created a darker earth: Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional fief 2,400 square miles in breadth and two centuries in depth, veined with the spilled blood of successive owners-the Indians, the Spanish, the French for a moment in time, then the Anglo-Saxons, "roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whisky, changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took 200 years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a capful of wild honey...
Rousing Rabble. Yoknapatawpha and its county seat, Jefferson, have their pale counterpart in actuality: Lafayette County and Oxford, where Faulkner lived, worked and occasionally puzzled his mildly curious fellow citizens. "The posted woods on my property contain several tame squirrels," he advised them a few years ago in a sarcastic no-trespassing notice he published in the weekly Oxford Eagle. "Any hunter who feels himself too lacking in woodcraft and marksmanship to approach a dangerous wild squirrel, might feel safe with these." But the real county is the one Faulkner invented, just as the real Troy is Homer...
...running whisky in New Orleans back in Prohibition days, and I met Sherwood Anderson," Faulkner used to explain when someone asked how he started to write. His first novel, Soldier's Pay, was published in 1926, but Faulkner had to make his living by odd jobs (including an epic failure as postmaster at Ole Miss) until Sanctuary, his seventh book, came out five years later. For almost the only time in his life he showed bitterness in public, boasting in a preface that the book was a "cheap idea" written only for money. But the money came, and when...
...Faulkner was deeply troubled by the uproar over school integration, and two years before the height of the Little Rock troubles, he told an interviewer: "I don't like enforced integration any more than I like enforced segregation ... As long as there's a middle road, all right, I'll be on it. But if it came to fighting, I'd fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes...
Deceptive Date. There were occasional drunks, too; Bill Faulkner had more violence in him than he could let out by writing, and he was too polite ever to raise his voice. His drinking bouts lasted for weeks, and relatives used to sit in relays with him as they ran their course. He launched into one just before he was slated to go to Stockholm to pick up his Nobel Prize, and his family, worried he might not come out of it in time, set the calendar ahead. Then someone said something about the local high school football game. Faulkner...