The Life of William Faulkner

This is a reassessment which uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a detailed portrait of the place and times William Faulkner inhabited. Arguably the greatest novelist yet to emerge from the United States, William Faulkner was a white Southerner creatively obsessed with problems of personal identity, social change, religion, sexuality, race, and that elaborate circuitry of passion and power - the family. In this major reassessment, now available in paperback, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a brilliantly detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited and to reveal just how intimately woven together were the tangled threads of Faulkner's personal and public experience - the privacy that Faulkner cherished and this history in which, whether he liked it or not, he was ensnared. In this major reassessment, now available in paperback, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a brilliantly detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited. Attending closely to each of the novels, Gray shows how they brim with an often undisclosed biography that is at once personal and cultural.