Faulkner

The year saw fewer individual essays on William Faulkner than in the past five years but more monographs, including a number of introductory volumes aimed at general audiences. His work continues to benefit from the full gamut of critical and theoretical approaches, with studies of the racial dynamics of his fiction predominating. One surprise emerged: a few critics have begun to investigate A Fable with increasing seriousness.

i Biography

A long-rumored story that Faulkner impregnated Estelle Oldham Franklin before their marriage and then paid for an abortion (a story Faulkner himself originated) has over the past few years begun to pass from rumor to fact in the various iterations of his biographies. In "Biographical Fact or Fiction? William Faulkner, Estelle Oldham Franklin, and Abortion" (MissQ 60 [2007]: 579–87) Robert W. Hamblin, the founding director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University and curator of the documents undergirding the new path of this story, traces the movement from Faulkner to Joel Williamson's William Faulkner and Southern History (1993) to Jay Parini's One Matchless Time (2004) and finally back to Faulkner's original biographer, Joseph Blotner. "It is crucial to note," Hamblin observes, "that while Williamson presents Faulkner telling Blotner the story as fact, he allows that Faulkner may have invented or exaggerated its content. By contrast, Parini's version [based on Williamson's and not the original documents] posits both the telling and the content as factual—though, strangely, the teller in his account is Estelle, not William." Without spoiling a reader's pleasure in observing a first-rate literary detective at work, I will say that Hamblin includes his correspondence with Blotner on the matter, during the course of which the venerable biographer expressed relief at correcting "the worst error of that kind [he] ever made."

James G. Watson, editor of this year's special Faulkner issue of Mississippi Quarterly (MissQ 60, iii), includes in the issue a new chapter in the beginning years of Faulkner's life as a published writer. "Faulkner to Liveright, September 18, 1928" (pp. 589–96) sets a newly discovered Faulkner letter to his first publisher, written to sever their business arrangements, in the context of his mounting excitement over the writing of The Sound and the Fury and accompanying doubt that Liveright's firm, which had published Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes but rejected Flags in the Dust and a book of short stories, would in fact publish such a radically new kind of novel. The essay includes a facsimile of the letter.

A brief but comprehensive biography of Faulkner appears in the revised and expanded William Faulkner A to Z (2002), newly titled Critical Companion to William Faulkner: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (Facts on File), ed. A. Nicholas Fargnoli et al. (see General Criticism, below). Ginger Rue, "Remembering Aunt Callie and Mr. William" (FJ 23, ii: 43–45), offers an interview with Caroline Barr's niece, Rachel Barr McGee, that does little more than confirm Faulkner's drinking habits.

ii General Criticism

One major reference work appeared, the aforementioned Critical Companion to William Faulkner. Adding over 80,000 words and several new sections to the original Faulkner A to Z, the editors have produced a remarkably compact and usable volume in four sections: "Biography," "Works A to Z," "Related People, Places, and Topics," and appendixes. The last section includes a wealth of secondary sources notable for its scope, which includes bibliographies, library holdings, and adaptations as well as Web sites, conferences, centers, and author societies. There is amusement as well as instruction in these pages, and sometimes both at once. For instance, I did not know that in The Reivers Lycurgus's last name is Briggins.

The year also saw publication of three general introductions to Faulkner's life and works. Of these Carolyn Porter's William Faulkner, a volume in the Oxford Lives and Legacies series (2007), takes the most conventional approach to Faulkner's career. Porter examines it in four chapters organized according to prevailing (and recently challenged) terms: the "apprenticeship" years leading up to The Sound and the Fury...