William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist [Hardcover]

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) was born in New Albany, Mississippi (situated northwest of Tupelo and northeast of Oxford) and died in Byhalia, Mississippi, northwest of Holly Springs, near the Tennessee state line. In 1902, his parents, Murry and Maud Falkner (sic) moved to Oxford, Mississippi. In 1930, William and his wife purchased a house in Oxford, which he named Rowan Oak, "after the rowan tree of his ancestral Scotland, a tree symbolic of security and peace." In this house, William and Estelle lived (except for William's many travels) for the rest of their lives. They had one child, Jill, born in 1933.

Considered one of the literary titans of American literature, Faulkner was a prolific writer. In his biography, William Faulkner: The Man and the Artist, renowned historian Stephen B. Oates writes, "Faulkner had more than thirty books to his credit, including nineteen novels, five collections of stories, a collection of three short novels, two anthologies, several limited editions of his short fiction, two editions of his New Orleans sketches, and two volumes of poetry, ample testimony to the size of the mark [or, as Faulkner put it, the "scratch"] he'd left on 'the wall of oblivion.'"

Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, two Pulitzer prizes, and numerous other awards. Not bad for a "self-made man" who had little formal education. His main claim to fame was the novels dealing with the characters of his fictitious Yoknapatawpha County saga (based on Lafayette County, of which Oxford is the country seat), which he described as "my own little postage stamp of native soil."

Of his 19 novels, Faulkner was at the apex of his creative artistry when he wrote The Sound and the Fury (1929; which Oates points out was "the novel closest to Faulkner's heart"); As I Lay Dying (1930; a story told by 15 different narrators); Light in August (1932); and Absalom! Absalom! (1936; which many critics opine to be his greatest work). Years later, he continued the Yoknapatawpha saga with a trilogy: The Hamlet, The Town, and the Mansion. Some of his short stories, such as "A Rose for Emily" and "The Bear," are also outstanding in quality.

Stephen B. Oates establishes the fact that Faulkner was a man who "heard voices" and was "driven by demons," both in his professional writing life and his personal sexual relationships. Oates points out that Faulkner was "an acute and chronic alcoholic" and a womanizer who had extramarital affairs with at least four women: Howard Hawks's secretary and "script girl," Meta Carpenter; a young writer, Joan Williams; Else Jonnson, whom he met in Stockholm, Sweden, where he went in 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize; and Jean Stein, the daughter of movie mogul Jules Stein. Several of these young women were less than half his age; he had a "thing" for beautiful young females who helped him deny his advancing years.

Faulkner's alcoholism frequently landed him in hospitals and sanitoria, which helped him "dry out." Old Crow and Jack Daniel were continually his fallback position, allowing him to "escape" from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (including recurring financial distress which caused him to become a hack in Hollywood, churning out inane and insipid movie scripts. "Between scotch and nothing," he once said, "I'll take scotch" and "Between grief and nothing, I'll take grief."

After many years of marriage, and tired of his philandering, Estelle offered Faulkner a divorce, but Faulkner declined. "He would not even discuss a divorce," writes Oates. "Between Estelle and nothing, Faulkner would clearly take Estelle."

William Faulkner died of a coronary occlusion, or myocardial infarction, at Wright's Sanitarium, where he had gone, once again, in an attempt to overcome his latest alcoholic binge, on July 6, 1962, at the age of 65, at Byhalia, Mississippi.

In less than four hundred pages, Stephen B. Oates has written a fascinating, highly readable, and intelligent biography of one of America's top-echelon writers, a man and an artist pursued and driven by demons, who created a fictional world describing humanity's hopes and fears, dreams and nightmares, triumphs and tragedies, magnificent successes and miserable failures, glory and shame. And many of Faulkner's own inner (and outer) conflicts and struggles find expression in the "real-life" characters brought to life by his creative imagination. With admiration, I commend Faulkner's works and Oates's biography of Faulkner to your reading experience.

Wonderful and compelling. Full of the magic of his creativity and it goes into depths of his pain.