Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 921 FAULKNER | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
"Nothing less than spellbinding . . . It's an eye-opener. Anecdotal without being tawdry, analytical without being academic, it captures the essence of Faulkner's life with the narrative drive of a novel." -- Houston Chronicle
"A splendid life of William Faulkner . . . Not only readable but downright enthralling." -- Seattle Times
William Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America's most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources--including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner's daughter and lovers--Jay Parini has crafted a biography that delves into the mystery of this gifted and troubled writer. His Faulkner is an extremely talented, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage who somehow transcends his limitations. Parini weaves the tragedies and triumphs of Faulkner's life in with his novels, serving up a biography that's as engaging as it is insightful.
Author Notes
Jay Parini was born in Pittston, Pennsylvania in 1948. In 1970 he graduated from Lafayette College and he received a doctorate from the University of St. Andrews in 1975. Before becoming a professor of Engliah and Creative Writing at Vermont's Middlebury College in 1982, Parini taught at Dartmouth College.
Parini writes poetry, novels, biographies, and criticism, and he has published numerous reviews and essays in major journals and newspapers. He co-founded the New England Review in 1976. In 1995, he was appointed literary executor for author Gore Vidal. A film version of The Last Station, his 1990 novel, was released in 2009.
Parini's novel, One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, made the New York Times bestseller list in 2015.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Veteran novelist and biographer Parini (Robert Frost; The Last Station) crafts a thorough account of the Nobel laureate's life (1897-1962), pausing with the publication of each book to reprise its plot and critical reception, and add his own evaluation of its merits. This is a reasonable approach, which benefits from the insights of such literary figures as Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, whom Parini interviewed before their deaths. But there isn't any startling new material to supersede Joseph Blotner's massive 1974 biography, though Parini strains to be up-to-date by emphasizing Faulkner's friendships with gay men and his fiction's homoerotic elements (unquestionably present, but hardly worth the amount of attention they receive here), as well as considering feminist assessments of the writer's female characters. His solid account makes it clear that once Faulkner established himself as a major American author, he basically did two things: write and drink. The clumsy prose ("It was with some relief, for her, that nothing came of her husband's efforts"), surprising from such a distinguished literary man as Parini, does not increase the book's readability. There's no question, however, about this biographer's admiration for his subject. Newcomers will find all the basic facts about a great American writer and his work, but Faulkner remains, as Parini acknowledges, a "mystery [that] cannot be `solved.' " (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Some fresh evidence but a conventional treatment of the Yoda of Yoknapatawpha County. As the author graciously acknowledges, anyone who writes about Faulkner (1897-1962) must pay homage (and assign many endnote numbers) to Joseph Blotner, whose two-volume Faulkner: A Biography (1974) remains foundational. But 30 years have passed, and Parini (Robert Frost: A Life, 1999, etc.) is an important and gifted biographer, and Faulkner, as Parini realizes, was a man with "many thousands of selves." Here, Parini deals with the dominant ones. The organization is traditional (one would think Faulkner might inspire in his biographer some convolution, some multiple points-of-view): strictly chronological, with later chapters arranged in a common pattern--Faulkner's personal life, the composition of his most recent book, the responses of the contemporaneous reviewers (Clifton Fadiman attacked virtually the entire canon of the future Nobel laureate), and then Parini's own exegesis, sometimes animated (sometimes larded) with the commentary of other scholars. Parini deals directly with Faulkner's human weaknesses--his alcoholism, his marital infidelities with ever-younger women (Parini is much more critical than Blotner of Estelle Faulkner, the writer's wife), and his racial attitudes. As Parini notes, Faulkner's comments during the 1950s sound uncomfortable to northern (or, maybe, humane) ears; he concludes that the great writer simply could not rise above his place and time--although he was considered racially radical in Mississippi. We see Faulkner in Oxford, Hollywood, New York, Charlottesville, the world. Like his rival Hemingway, he lied about his war record. But he was an accomplished horseman (despite many grievous falls later in life), an amateur pilot, an eager sailor, a voracious reader of novels. Parini shows in bright relief the fierce discipline that enabled Faulkner to produce major works in a short time (As I Lay Dying he wrote in 47 days) and recognizes the progressively declining quality of his work. Excellent portraits of Faulkner's falls from various horses--and his determination, no matter how broken, to remount. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A boy who loved solitary rambles and hanging around his father's livery stable, the hub of daily life in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner became a poetry-writing dandy known first as the Count, then, given his feckless ways and taste for alcohol, Count No 'Count. But this seeming ne'er-do-well possessed an abiding love of the land, keen curiosity about southern history, and an unwavering devotion to literature. It takes a fellow artist to fully understand the vagaries of the creative process, and not only is Parini a poet and a novelist, he is also the author of two previous, uniquely enlightening biographies of John Steinbeck and Robert Frost. Here Parini--his prose crystalline, his interpretation proficient--brilliantly illuminates Faulkner's complex psyche, phenomenal literary innovations, and demanding life. As Parini tracks Faulkner from his chaotic incubation period to the one matchless time between 1928 and 1942 when he wrote one revolutionary masterpiece after another, his stints in Hollywood, efforts as a farmer and patriarch of a needy extended family, and winning of the Nobel Prize, Faulkner and his immeasurably influential work come into focus as never before. Engrossing and revelatory, this is a landmark biography. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2004 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Faulkner remains one of our most enigmatic novelists. Thirty years ago, Joseph Blotner provided the now-definitive biography of the author (Faulkner: A Biography). To his credit, novelist and critic Parini, who has written graceful biographies of Frost and Steinbeck, does not try to surpass Blotner's achievement but incorporates Blotner's insights into his own eloquent and magnificent critical biography. Relying on newly available archival materials, especially letters to Faulkner's mother and to novelist Joan Williams, Parini offers a portrait of a man always trying to invent a new mask for himself as well as the portrait of an artist consumed by a desire to tell about the South and its class struggles, its depravity, and its captivity to the double bonds of land and history. Parini examines each of Faulkner's novels, from Soldier's Pay to The Reivers, and connects the Snopses, Sutpens, and Compsons of Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County foibles, his insecurities, and his inestimable literary achievement. Highly recommended for all libraries.-Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
One Matchless Time A Life of William Faulkner Chapter One Origins A Sense of Place The past is never dead. It's not even past. -- Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun A sense of place was everything to William Faulkner, and more than any other American novelist in the twentieth century, he understood how to mine the details of place, including its human history, for literary effects. His novels, from the outset, are obsessed with what T. S. Eliot once referred to as "significant soil," but the outward details of place quickly become inner details as Faulkner examines the soul of his characters through the prism of their observations, their rootings and branchings, their familial and social as well as geographical contexts. Place, for Faulkner, becomes a spiritual location from which he examines a truth deeper than anything like mere locality. Faulkner saw himself as taking part in a great process, moving through history and, in an intriguing way, creating a counterhistory of his own. He would focus in his fiction on a parallel universe based on the "real" universe of Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner's invented region, Yoknapatawpha County, was named after an actual stream that ran through Lafayette County, the name itself meaning, according to Faulkner, "the water runs slow through flat land." Lafayette was among several counties created by various acts of violence in northern Mississippi in the 1830s, when the native Chickasaw tribe was driven westward, displaced by a procession of planters, slaves, and small farmers, all of whom worked together to fashion an economy based on cotton. At least for a while -- before repeated plantings of cotton depleted the topsoil -- this economy worked well for the white population of Lafayette, especially those living at its middle and higher end. Not surprisingly, this prosperous class regarded the abolition of slavery as a threat to their way of life and joined forces with those who believed in secession. Their allegiance to the Old South was, for the most part, unwavering. In Faulkner's fiction, the Sartoris clan would stand in for this class, the planter class, and their failure over generations is one of his most compelling themes, counterpointed by the implacable emergence of the Snopes clan, representing the greedy, unscrupulous white folks who come from the outlying country and who form a kind of counterpoint to the Sartoris clan, although it is somewhat misleading to regard this dialectic in a simplistic fashion, since there are admirable Snopeses and selfish, inconsiderate members of the Sartoris family. The Civil War came as a tidal wave, sweeping over northern Mississippi with a vengeance. Oxford itself -- Faulkner's hometown, and the focal point of his imagination -- was ransacked by Union troops (which included many liberated slaves in their ranks) in August of 1864. The aftershocks of this horrific war reverberated through the decades, and Faulkner's characters might be considered survivors of an original trauma, often unspoken, absorbed and transmogrified in their own lives and relived as other kinds of trauma. Even World War I, which obsessed Faulkner, was in a sense an extension, for him, of the original war, which destroyed families by pitting brother against brother, father against son. (Faulkner plays out some of these conflicts in A Fable, a late novel set mostly on the western front, and in many stories.) It is in the nature of things for violent acts to repeat themselves, even though the original source of the violence is lost to view. In many ways, Faulkner's writing is about uncovering these hidden sources of disruption, about following their echoes and unconscious reenactments down the decades. Even the form of his narratives -- obsessed with revision as much as vision -- often reproduces the content, with the novels and stories ("a few old mouth-to-mouth tales," as Faulkner says in Absalom, Absalom!) doubling back on themselves. Lafayette County was indeed a representative county, even without Faulkner. As Don H. Doyle notes, "Quite apart from Faulkner's unique contribution to the history of this county and region, Lafayette County, Mississippi, stands on its own as a southern community whose history can reveal much about the larger past of which it is part."1 One tends, when thinking of the Old South, to concentrate on the more settled parts of that region, from Virginia southward through the Carolinas and Georgia and Alabama. Mississippi, at the western border of the Old South, occupied a liminal territory on the wilder edge of frontier society. It was, as a result of its position, more dynamic, less predictable, and therefore appealing to a writer's imagination, a place where he could explore the "human heart in conflict with itself," as he said in his Nobel address in Stockholm in December 1950. Faulkner examined a wide range of social classes, each struggling for survival in a county that fell between piney hills and richly fertile river valley. Two rivers dominated the region: the Tallahatchie and the Yoknapatawpha -- the names themselves like poems in the ears of a young boy sensitive to language. During Faulkner's childhood, the lower ranks of society were dominated by sharecroppers and "poor white trash," who course vividly through his fiction. Of course, before the Civil War, there were the slaves -- the rock bottom of society, who later become "free" Negroes and who worked the fields after the war in much the same way they worked the land before the war. Faulkner would write about them frequently, and with sympathy, although not with the same passion or inwardness that he reserves for white characters. Forty percent of the white families in Lafayette County owned slaves before the war, as Doyle notes, with half of these families owning five slaves or fewer. (A few families owned more than a hundred slaves, but this was exceptional.) The slaves themselves made up roughly half of the county's population. Nearly a century later, the balance between the black and white population remained roughly the same. Needless to say, blacks in post-Civil War Mississippi lived close to the poverty line, sinking into a period of deep subjugation from which they would find little relief until the civil rights movement of the 1960s began to lift their burden, however slightly ... One Matchless Time A Life of William Faulkner . Copyright © by Jay Parini. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner by Jay Parini All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
