William Faulkner and Southern History |
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You Are Here: Home > History Books > Hockey History > Item 148
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William Faulkner and Southern History
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by Joel Williamson
Sales Rank: 283735
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List Price: $45.00
$40.50
At Amazon
on 11-2-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 544 pages
Published by: Oxford University Press, USA December 14, 1995
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0195101294
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0195101294
Book Dimensions:
9.1 x 6 x 1.3 inches
Weighs: 1.8 pounds
From Library Journal
In this masterful blend of family history, biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, noted Southern historian Williamson (Univ. of North Carolina) explores the elements that make up Faulkner's fictional universe. Williamson demonstrates that the themes of race, class, sex, and violence that dominate Faulkner's fiction arise out of the conflict between an idealism generated by the Southerners' desire for an Edenic world in which individuals enact well-defined cultural, political, and social roles and a realism, fostered by modern industrial society, that challenged such roles. Williamson applies this thesis with particular force to the roles of sex and community in Faulkner's writing. The book also provides a clearer picture than other Faulkner biographies of his time in Hollywood, his insatiable desire for younger women, and his recurring drinking bouts. Williamson's study is a fine complement to Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography ( LJ 4/15/84) and a nice addition to cultural histories of the South. Highly recommended for public libraries.
- Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Westerville P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
In a perceptive and sympathetic account based on extensive research in archives and public records, Williamson (Humanities/Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; The Crucible of Race, 1984, etc.) offers some revelations about Faulkner's ancestry and background, along with a comprehensive commentary on the novelist's life and works. Ashamed of his background, Faulkner, Williamson tells us, spent as much energy reinventing himself as he did creating his fiction. Rather than his descending, as he claimed, from Scottish Highlanders or an aristocratic slave-owning southern family, Faulkner's paternal grandfather, ``the Colonel,'' was an eccentric businessman, while his maternal grandfather was a sheriff who shot the editor of the local paper, embezzled public funds, and ran off with a mulatto girl. Faulkner's fictions about his own life were similarly less colorful than reality. He represented himself as, variously, an RAF pilot wounded in WW I, a bootlegger, a gentleman farmer, and, in his final invention, as a gentleman equestrian who rode the Virginia hunts. In fact, Faulkner never flew and his farm was a failure. He began writing while tending a boiler all night, married a divorc‚e, and ended up raising and supporting her children and family as well as his own. His real-life travels, seductions, and alcoholic bouts--especially with Howard Hawks, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart while adapting Hemingway's To Have and Have Not--are more interesting than his invented role as simple southern farmer, and than the other roles he assumed, such as literary ambassador (after his 1950 Nobel) and academic. Similarly, Williamson's Platonic schematization of Faulkner's work is less interesting than the intense experience and vitality of the fiction, which may or may not have had roots in Faulkner's life, culture, and beliefs. The biographical material here and the social history involving racial issues, sex, and class are especially significant- -but there's not much on the southern history of the title. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
Surprisingly, considering that Williamson authored the excellent Crucible of Race, this book was shorter on relating Faulkner to southern history than on relating Faulkener's sexual history. Long stretches are more about Faulkner and his various mistresses than about Faulkner and southern history (there's even some rather strained meanderings on homosexuality). Literary analysis is shunted mostly to the end, and, when it comes to that, I have read better from English professors. There's a discussion of a lynching that Faulkner may (or may not) have witnessed as a youth. By far the best material on Faulkner and the South deals with the period when he became a liberal (by white southern standards) spokesman on racial issues in the fifties, was viciously attacked and beat an ignominious retreat; but this could have made a journal article. Overall, a neither fish nor fowl book, but still with some interesting sections.
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William Faulkner and Southern History
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Price: $40.50
Updated on 11-2-2008.
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