"What a pleasure! . . . Essential for understanding Faulkner, and a good read for everybody." —Noel Polk
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home," says Darl Bundren in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. How much Faulkner himself is speaking may be suggested by this moving collection of nearly 150 letters. Written during his twenties, these letters describe Faulkner's first encounters with the North ("...I made my first subway trip yesterday. The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice."); his brief World War I military service, which grew in the retelling; the productive New Orleans months with Sherwood Anderson; and his first trip to Europe, with cold autumn days in Paris ("Good thing the Lord gave these folks wine--they rate a recompense of some kind for this climate.") Fascinating in themselves for their close observation of people and places, the letters also offer glimmers of The Sound and the Fury and other future works, as the young writer stores up characters, settings, and events that will re-emerge, transformed, int the great novels of his maturity. Never before published, these letters are from the Faulkner collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. "These letters, for years sequestered and unavailable, are among the most informative, touching, and eloquent William Faulkner ever wrote. No Faulkner specialist can be without this book; no Faulkner admirer should be without it."—Joseph Blotner, author of Faulkner: A Biography
Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank.
Rejected by the US military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in 1925.
His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably The Blue Lamp, co-written with Raymond Chandler.
William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers just before his death in July 1962.
