In 1957 and 1958 William Faulkner was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. During that time he held thirty-seven conferences and answered over two thousand questions on a wide range of concerns, from exegetic problems in his novels to the role of the writer in modern society. Almost every word was recorded on tape, and the result is the classic Faulkner in the University, originally published in 1959 and now available for the first time in a paperback edition. The material collected here offers testimony to some fascinating exchanges between the author and his public and makes up one of the few sourcebooks available on Faulkner's personal views. As the writer himself commented, "These are questions answered without rehearsal or preparation, by a man old enough in the craft of the human heart to have learned that there are no definitive answers to anything, yet still young enough in spirit to believe that truth may still be found provided one seeks enough, tests and discards, and still tries again".

White southern writers are frequently associated with the racism of blackface minstrelsy in their representations of African American characters, however, this book makes visible the ways in which southern novelists repeatedly imagine their white characters as in some sense fundamentally black.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, in this reconsideration of Faulkner's life and legacy. William Faulkner, one of America’s most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance—his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South—demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate’s life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon. Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions—and perhaps because of them—William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner’s biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was “the South’s curse and its separate destiny,” a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South’s revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a “Lost Cause” romanticism not only defined Faulkner’s twentieth century but now even our own age. Through Gorra’s critical lens, Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America’s history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, “was” and “again.” Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that “the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning.” Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra’s travels through the South—including Faulkner’s Oxford, Mississippi—and commentaries on Faulkner’s fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.

In 1948, responding to orders from on high, the Atlanta Police Department is forced to hire its first black officers, including war veterans Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith. The newly minted policemen are met with deep hostility by their white peers; they arent allowed to arrest white suspects, drive squad cars, or set foot in the police headquarters. But they carry guns, and they must bring law enforcement to a deeply mistrustful community. When black a woman who was last seen in a car driven by a white man turns up dead, Boggs and Smith take up the investigation on their own, as no one else seems to care. Their findings set them up against a brutal cop, Dunlow, who has long run the neighborhood as his own, and his partner, Rakestraw, a young progressive who may or may not be willing to make allies across color lines. Among shady moonshiners, duplicitous madams, crooked lawmen, and the constant restrictions of Jim Crow, Boggs and Smith will risk their new jobs, and their lives, while navigating a dangerous world--a world on the cusp of great change. --

Essays that focus on a theme central to understanding William Faulkner's works and illuminate his various stances on race

Bockting has produced a work that focuses on the "people" that Faulkner created in his four major psychological novels: The Sound and the Fury (1929); As I Lay Dying (1920), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The author writes not about these people, either as literary characters or as human beings, but instead has allowed them to come alive in their own time, through their own texts. Psychostylistics is the innovative approach to the literary character that Bockting employs, bringing together new developments in narrative psychology and psychiatry with literary stylistics and mind-style to provide detailed textual and contextual evidence in support of its observations on personality. Contents: The Literary Character: Between Life and Linguistic Style; Mind-Style in The Sound and the Fury; Multiple Voices in As I Lay Dying; Light in August and the Issues of Unreliability; Absalom, Absalom!: A Novel of Attribution; Character, Personality, and Psychostylistics.