“On Coming Late to Faulkner”

In this chapter, the author talks about coming late to William Faulkner. He begins by saying that “if you discover the Old Man late: you have heard of him if you have heard of William Shakespeare, if you have heard of the Civil War, and your apprehension of him will be constituted of a vague kind of hybrid of those entities grown out of more or less local soil...” According to the author, if you come to Faulkner late you may escape finding yourself enthralled, intoxicate, intestate. He recalls the time his English teacher gave him a copy of Absalom, Absalom! and says he was not the same boy when he finished reading the novel.

“Emerging as a Writer in Faulkner’s Mississippi”

In this chapter, the author reflects on William Faulkner's influence on her and on other Southern writers. The author says it would be impossible to think of Oxford, Mississippi without thinking of Faulkner, its most famous citizen. She recalls growing up in Carrollton, but admits that it took her many long years in associating Oxford and the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) with Faulkner. It wasn't until she was in her early twenties and in graduate school at Vanderbilt that the author realized she must find out more about Faulkner. She began reading some of Faulkner's novels, including The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses and The Collected Stories. Critics inevitably compared her to Faulkner because of resemblances between their works. The author also reflects on three unanswered questions about Faulkner's work: his nihilism, his treatment of women characters, and the fictional Snopes family in his novels.

“Literary Influences”

This chapter presents an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, who talks about his literary influences, including William Faulkner. García Márquez cites Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis as the fundamental influence on his writing. A decisive influence on him, according to García Márquez, is Oedipus Rex. He also discusses Faulkner's influence on him, claiming that they share similar experiences. In particular, García Márquez reveals that Faulkner's whole world—the world of the South which he writes about—was very like his world, that it was created by the same people. He also cites the fact that Faulkner is in a way a Latin American writer whose world is that of the Gulf of Mexico.

“Faulkner: Past and Future”

This chapter offers a local and personal testimony about the influence of William Faulkner. The author of this chapter remembers the day he, while attending Oxford University, received a copy of Soldiers' Pay. It was also the time when he was making his first serious attempt at fiction, with a setting in the part of the South where he had grown up. He suggests that the first, powerful impact of Faulkner's work was by an immediate intuition, not by the exegesis of critics. The author also looks back to the place and time when Faulkner began to write. The chapter argues that Faulkner is the most profound experimenter in the novel that America has produced, but the experiments were developed out of an anguishing research into the southern past and the continuing implications of that past.

“A Man of the South”

This chapter focuses on William Faulkner's “power to transpose the American scene as it exists in the southern states, filter it through his sensibilities and finally define it with words.” It notes how Americans living abroad were at first ashamed of Faulkner, but eventually came to realize his greatness. Faulkner's achievement is all the more remarkable in that he is a southern white man. and the main burden of his work is moral confusion and social decay, themes that he presents in terms of stories of violence enacted by fantastic characters. This chapter suggests that Faulkner, in showing the degradation of the South, affirmed its essential humanity for America and for the world.

“The Private World of William Faulkner”

This chapter argues that William Faulkner is an individualist, and that his individuality, both in his life and in his writing, is part of his breeding, background, and nature. Faulkner's spirit of individuality can be attributed to his being a Southern Democrat. It is difficult to disassociate him from his home town of Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner is also known for his aversion to personal exploitation and publicity. The chapter discusses Sanctuary, Faulkner's most widely read novel that propelled him from obscurity into fame and notoriety. It also comments on legends that have grown up about Faulkner, including the notion that he is a prodigious drunk and the story surrounding his first experience as a Hollywood writer.

“Mr. Faulkner’s Southern Saga”

This chapter discusses The Portable Faulkner, the first comprehensive survey of William Faulkner's work that chronicles the saga of the South. In his preface to The Portable Faulkner, Malcolm Cowley calls the collection a legend, “because it is obviously no more intended as an historical account of the country south of the Ohio than The Scarlett Letter was intended as a history of Massachusetts or Paradise Lost as a factual account of the Fall.” Cowley and Marion O'Donnell are the only critics see in The Portable Faulkner not a series of novels with sociological implications, but a saga, a legend that is still in the making. The text also compares Faulkner with Gustave Flaubert and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Journal Entries

This chapter contains a number of journal entries, written between April 10, 1940 and November 6, 1949. In them, Thornton Wilder talks about three of William Faulkner's novels: Light in August, The Hamlet, and Absalom, Absalom!. Wilder first comments on Light in August, the climax of which is the castration of the half-Negro demon-hero Joe Christmas. According to Wilder, Faulkner represents the humiliation of the once gallant South in sexual terms; the Negro's strength is perpetually before their eyes to remind them of their loss. He then turns to what he believes is Faulkner's fancy overwriting in The Hamlet before concluding with a discussion of Absalom, Absalom! and its motif that the institution of slavery set in motion its own retribution.

“Absalom, Absalom!”

This chapter talks about Absalom, Absalom!. It begins by saying that “William Faulkner's vicarious heroic would have taken him to reunions of the American pilots who formed the Eagle Squadron of the Royal Air Force...His true heroics, visible and audible on every page, depend on fecundity, on the constant chance of saying something original by way of oratory.” It argues that Absalom, Absalom! is a visionary novel, a model of the impenitently pensive work of art. In conclusion, it notes that there is one big thing about Faulkner: he reminds you that, “when the deep purple blooms, you are looking not at a posy but at a dimension”.

“Reading Faulkner from a Writer’s Point of View”

In this chapter, the author offers a reading of William Faulkner from his point of view of as a writer. He begins by discussing one of Faulkner's unique narrative techniques, “reticence,” and explaining that when he reads Faulkner's novels, he always puts the translations beside the originals, whenever they are available. He claims that he experiences Faulkner through a triangular circuit for the transmission of verbal symbols—Faulkner; the translator, who is a specialist; and himself, a reader of the words of the other two. He also reflects on his response to Faulkner's attitude toward writing novels and to his way of activating the imagination. Finally, he considers Faulkner's way of manipulating his male and female characters by focusing on his novels The Hamlet, The Mansion, The Wild Palms, and Absalom, Absalom!.