William Faulkner: American Writer : A Biography - Hardcover

Karl, Frederick Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555840884 ISBN 13: 9781555840884

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1989

Synopsis

Illuminates how Faulkner's Southern heritage, his drinking, and his relations with women were woven into a single imaginative pattern that bodied forth the self-imposed myths about himself and inspired his fiction

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

It's tempting to consider these 1200 pages the ne plus ultra of Faulkner studies, not only for the book's comprehensiveness but for its depth. Karl, a noted Joseph Conrad scholar, blends into one alert, seamless and often sharply insightful narrative meticulous detail regarding Faulkner's life with probing examination of his obsession with the Civil War and its long shadow, the myth-making that was central to his creative imagination and the narrative strategies that went into novels such as As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! ("very possibly the greatest of twentieth-century American novels") and stretched our notion of what a novel can be. We can see Faulkner's indebtedness to Conrad, Eliot and Joyce, his influence on the likes of Camus and Garcia Marquez, his concern for racial equality, his grim focus on the dark side of human nature, and how his fiction embodied all the great American themes from frontierism to Edenic dispossession and suicide. We also see Faulkner the husband, lover, alcoholic, Hollywood scriptwriter and Nobel laureate. Karl takes full measure of the man, at his peak and in his decline, and the book is a monument to the critical biographer's art. Photos.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

The literature on Faulkner has a hefty new entry with the publication of this biography. Karl's work is very much a life of Faulkner; he fills the pages with family background, incidents from all stages of Faulkner's development, and a sort of psychological analysis of Faulkner's life and the content of his fiction (which does not altogether work). Given Joseph Blotner's substantial biographical writings ( Faulkner, LJ 4/1/74; LJ 4/15/85. rev. ed.), one must wonder at the publication of this massive biography. The works are different, and Karl provides much factual data, but only academic libraries and others with an interest in the subject need purchase.
- John Budd, Graduate Lib. Sch., Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Pr
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 1555840884
• ISBN 13: 9781555840884
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1