Customer Reviews

Faulkner: A Biography (Southern Icons)

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Originally published in two volumes, Joseph L. Blotner's biography of the imminent writer of the American South, William Faulkner, is often touted as THE chronicle of Faulkner's life. Blotner's style is really quite readable. Indeed, this text is so accessible, one must question his accountability on some instances of Faukner's words to friends and loved ones. (Who really remembers what his wife's father said to him on a particular day--famous or not?) All in all, though, this chronicle sits on the top of the biographical heap for the time being. And it probably won't be displaced for many years to come.

Blotner did a prodigious amount of research for this biography. Any later writer who wants to produce a biography of Faulkner will inevitably find himself or herself relying on much of Blotner's work. The reader, however, will not be so grateful. Blotner seems incapable of distinguishing between that which is important and that which is not. It seems as though he has dumped almost everything he learned into this book. And he learned quite a lot. Why we need, for example, to know the names of everyone Faulkner came into contact with? Finally, Blotner is not a gifted writer; his style is typical of the academic. I can only hope someone writes a shorter, more readable biography of Faulkner someday.

This is a very long and detailed biography which tells more than most people will want to know about its subject. What disappointed me however was not the work of Blotner which was painstaking and caring, but the figure he depicted. The great writer and Faulkner truly is a great writer seems in his life much smaller than his work. It is not only his unhappy relationship with wife and family, but a general spirit of meanness which prevailed in many of his human relationships. One heartwarming element though is the recognition he received at the end of his life, and the way that seemed to transform him into being more outgoing and generous.

... couldn't agree more. My copy's a doorstop on a little-used door.

A book such as this is only justified as a first biography, which it most definitely is not.

The author's (unfortunate) name classifies an epithetical genre all its own--the unreadable, endless compendium of mind-numbing factoids: the blotner.