Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
The Mississippi-born, Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner gave the world Yoknapatawpha County. He joined the Canadian Royal Air Force in the Great War and learned to fly but never saw action; he lived in Oxford, Mississippi, for nearly his whole life and once turned down an invitation to an artists' dinner from the Kennedy White House because he said it was too far to go to eat with strangers. He rode to the fox hounds in Charlottesville, Virginia, in his later years and had his portrait made in formal riding clothes, yet he was just as likely to pose for photographs in his tattered khakis and nearly ruined Harris tweed jacket. To say he cherished his privacy is to understate the case radically: he once wrote that “it is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history … in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died.”
He has now done both those things – made the books and died – and more than forty years after his passing, he remains widely read, discussed, assigned, analyzed, and invoked. Every major school of criticism has been applied to his most famous novels; every major anthology of American and world literature includes his work.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner , pp. xi - xiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008