Word: faulkners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Central figure in any investigation of Southern literary life is William Faulkner. This short, reticent Southerner, sharp-eyed as a gambler, lives about as close to the heart of the South as it is possible to get-in Oxford, Miss., a county seat of 2,890 people, 62 miles southeast of Memphis. Historically speaking, nothing much has happened to Oxford since the Yankees burned it 75 years ago. It has a courthouse square, which Mississippi-born Artist John McCrady painted in Town Square (see cut). It has its Confederate monument on which a soldier stands stonily at ease...
...most of his 41 years William Faulkner has observed the life that revolves around Oxford's courthouse square. For twelve years he has packed his observation into a series of bitter, imaginative, extraordinarily powerful but extremely uneven books. For the last nine years he has been successful, regarded by critics as the most talented but least predictable Southern writer, by his fellow townsmen as an enigma, by himself as a social historian, who hopes that by recording the minute changes in Oxford's life he can suggest the changes that are transforming the whole South...
...House, $2.50), it is a wild, outraged and outrageous novel, which boils over with outlandish humor and grotesque incident. Part of it is a swift story, funny and slightly maddening. Part of it is involved psychological analysis mixed with melodrama, just plain maddening. In most of his previous books Faulkner has written of a mythical Southern town. In The Wild Palms he has a new hero, but he has not left the South. This time his hero is the Mississippi...
Moral. Had Faulkner been content to let The Wild Palms rest with the convict's story, the book might have become a classic of involuntary adventure. It is a pulsing, racing story, a kind of hysterical Huckleberry Finn, its humor at once grotesque and shrewd, its moral at once grim and humane. The convict, with his thoughtless courage, his exasperation at the titanic forces unleashed against him, is Faulkner's most original and attractive character. And the whole book is conceived in the grand manner. Faulkner makes you feel the terrible fragility of man's levees, boats...
...When Faulkner finished the convict's story, however, he felt that it was incomplete. He therefore wrote another novel and inserted the chapters between chapters of the convict's tale. This second novel tells of a young New Orleans doctor who runs off with another man's wife. When she becomes pregnant he performs an abortion, as a result of which she dies and he is jailed for life...