William Faulkner: His Life and Work [Paperback]

David Minter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 28, 1997

In this highly acclaimed biography, David Minter draws upon a wealth of material, including the novelist's essays, interviews, published and unpublished letters, as well as his poems, stories, and novels, to illuminate the close relationship between the flawed life and the artistic achievement of one of twentieth-century America's most complex literary figures. In the process, he reveals a Faulkner who is powerful, vulnerable, real—every bit as fascinating as the characters he created. Anyone who has ever tarried in Yoknapatawpha County will find this a sensitive and readable account of the novelist's struggles in art and life. In his new preface, Minter locates his biography in relation to the changes in the literary critical landscape during the 1980s and discusses its departures from New Critical tenets about the relationship between authors' lives and their works.

Editorial Reviews

Review

One emerges from reading it with fresh understanding of Faulkner both as man and writer, with feelings of sympathy and, even more, admiration.

(Times Higher Education Supplement )

Any future Faulkner biographer—and there will be others, rest assured of that—will find it difficult to surpass what Minter has accomplished.

(Jonathan Yardley Washington Post )

One emerges from reading [Minter's book] with a fresh understanding of Faulkner both as man and writer, with feelings of sympathy and, even more, admiration.

(Richard Gray Times Higher Education Supplement )

The great virtue of David Minter's book is that he knows that the question of who a man was is less interesting than that of whom he wished to become... It is in the poems and the novels that we can trace the self to which Faulkner aspired.

(Lachlan Mackinnon Times Literary Supplement )

An excellent book... It sets forth, often very sensitively, the elements of Faulkner's personality that make the fictional universe of Yoknapatawpha County assume the forms it takes in the major novels.

(Louis D. Rubin, Jr. )

Book Description

A widely acclaimed biography presents a Faulkner who is powerful, vulnerable, real—every bit as fascinating as the characters he created.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 344 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press; 2nd edition (August 28, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801857473
• ISBN-13: 978-0801857478
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #993,211 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Tragedy, October 20, 2005

By 

Billyjack D'Urberville (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: William Faulkner: His Life and Work (Paperback)

Faulkner's life is a massive subject that oddly seems to become more, rather than less elusive with time. He was at least half a 19th century sensibility, and samplings from recent biographies show him disappearing in the fog of current political corectness. The major, "official" biography in 2 volumes by Joseph Blotner is of course indispensible for names, dates, places, and other essential data. Nor can one fault Blotner for his respect for the writer; too many literary biographies seem to run on virtual hostility, anymore. But something nonetheless is missing from Blotner and all of the others, and this book by David Mintner supplies it.

Minter presents an unforgettable portrait of a tragic, suffering Faulkner that is both scarily true and absolutely renching. Chiefly, the elements of the pain are a terrible addiction to alcohol and an unhappy marriage. Indeed Faulkner's alcoholism was legendary during his own life, but was seen by detractors as a sort of joke, by defenders (in a much more boozed age than the present) as no big deal.

Be forewarned: you may never want to read another book about an alcoholic writer or artist, or any kind of alcoholic, afterwards. It is done, too, with both an uncanny intimacy and a saving sympathy. Yet all this might merely add up to the stuff of soap operas, but for Mintner's like insistence on emphasizing the writer's enobling mission and belief in the greatness of his own work. Out of the South's defeat and out of his own Celtic bloodline Faulkner inherited a romance for lost causes; doing the impossible and failing was his great and oft-expressed polestar. With attention both to the impossibly sublime and the quite real pathology, Mintner presents a portrait of Faulkner that not only makes sense in human terms, but also gives an aura of universality to the story of this major American artist.

As difficult as this encounter with truth is, then, it is necessary and convincing. You will finally understand the sort of man who could have created the fragility of a Quentin Compson, the monstrosity of a Colonel Supten, and a whole universe of others, all out of himself. Even the alcoholism becomes explicable, with a kind of awful clarity, when you come to dimly see what a rare sort of human being is here under review: a sort of empath, who either by birth or by will felt the accumulated pain of his region's entire history and people before he could project it. In this sense the alcohol was a sort of folk home remedy which provided support to the impossible undertaking.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Should Have Been a Thesis, January 11, 2009

By 

Tex Caledonia (Austin, Texas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: William Faulkner: His Life and Work (Paperback)

Faulkner has always been an interesting American writer. He was complicated, lazy, unfocused, egocentric, and at times, absolutely brilliant. But Mr. Minter has an overlycomplicated writing style that tends to include too many literary comparisons most readers may not be familiar with. He also has a way of dancing around the topic a little too much for my tastes and makes the book a less enjoyable read than it should be. I would have enjoyed a book that was more to the point and not something that reads like an attention starved graduate student's thesis.