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Recommended Biography:
Faulkner: A Biography by Joseph Blotner

Even while he was alive, a mystique was forming about William Faulkner. The mystique has continued to grow and solidify so that any Southern writer working today must wrestle with the ghost of Faulkner.

The mystique formed around one word - difficult. Faulkner was perceived as a difficult man in temperament and his writing was characterized as difficult to understand. The mystique dissipates somewhat when one understands Faulkner, both as man and writer, but the respect for his canonical literary achievement remains.

William Cuthbert Falkner (he added the "u" in later years) was born in New Albany, Mississippi in September of 1897. As Joseph Blotner recounts in his definitive biography of Faulkner, "He was a colicky baby . . .he would keep his mother awake almost every night."

The Falkners were businessmen, and the same was expected of William. But various family attempts to interest him in commerce, jobs in banking and bookkeeping were among his short-lived jobs, proved futile for as he stated at the time, "Money [is] a contemptible thing to work for."

Eventually, Faulkner found time to write. His first book, "The Marble Faun," a book of poetry, was published in 1924. Soon, the flow of novels began.

Reviews on the first novels were mixed, and the proceeds were not enough to sustain the family he was starting nor rehabilitate the old home that he had purchased in Oxford that he called Rowan Oak.

Faulkner turned to Hollywood. It was purely for the money. Faulkner wrote home in a letter to his wife Estelle, "I'm doing all this to try to make enough money to get the hell out of this place and come back home and fix Missy's [their daughter] room and paint the house and do the other things we need." Faulkner was part of the screenwriting teams on "The Left Hand of God," "The Big Sleep," and "Mildred Pierce."

Part of the difficulty in reading Faulkner stemmed from his exploration of new ways to tell a story. Though thousands of miles and cultures apart, and probably unaware of what the others were doing, a handful of writers at about the same time - Virginia Woolf in England, Knut Hamsun in Norway, Marcel Proust in France, as well as William Faulkner in Mississippi - were experimenting with a stream of consciousness narrative, a denser way of telling stories directly from inside the minds of their characters. All respected the intelligence of the reading public and rewarded their readers with fresher and more immediate insights into the motivations and the ruminations of their characters. This was not reading made difficult just to be difficult, but rather it was an attempt to more accurately render reality, how we think and would react ourselves if in the same situations.

"As I Lay Dying" is one of Faulkner's best novels. Published in 1930, each chapter is told from the perspective of one of a handful of different characters. Family and neighbors of the dirt poor, rural Mississippi Bundren family all gather round as Addie Bundren, wife, mother, and friend, has lain down in bed to die. In a classic Faulkner line, from inside her head, we hear Addie as she thinks, "I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time."

Humor and tragedy mix in this novel. After Addie dies, the family tries to carry out her last wish to be buried in a far off town with her own kin. In the back of a horse-drawn wagon, over the course of a few days, they haul her corpse all over the county in an attempt to find a way across a swollen river. Even in her death, Addie can find no rest.

Is reading Faulkner difficult? No more so than staring at a deep, rich painting by an Impressionist painter such as Monet. In short strokes of bold color, Monet's purpose was to capture a fleeting glimpse of a subject, in short, to render reality for a meaningful second in time. It is exceedingly difficult to capture the whole essence of a Monet painting without studying the parts. Faulkner should be approached in the same manner with the same resultant pleasure. Focus on the individual strokes - the memorable characters, their rich dialect, the foibles of their reasoning that lead them into trouble, and the canvas of Southerness that underlies the novel as a whole. Each time you study a skillful painting you can see something new; each time you reread Faulkner you discover something new about the story and about yourself.

Faulkner died in 1962 in Mississippi. The recognition of his talent during his life had included the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and the National Book Award. Arguably, he is the best writer of fiction that America has produced.

Faulkner II: The Historian