Oprah’s Summer of Faulkner

ROBERT W. HAMBLIN Southeast Missouri State University Oprah’s Summer of Faulkner1 ON JUNE 3, 2005, ON HER INTERNATIONALLY TELEVISED TALK SHOW, Oprah Winfrey reached into a huge carton labeled “Big Surprise,” pulled out a boxed set of three novels, and announced that William Faulkner would be the featured author for Oprah’s Book Club for the next three months. In June, Winfrey explained, the club would read As I Lay Dying, in July The Sound and the Fury, and in August Light in August. Except for Winfrey’s closest friends and business associates, particularly those who directed OBC activities through the Oprah.com website, I was one of only a few people who knew in advance what Winfrey was going to lift from that surprise box. Six weeks earlier I had been contacted by Mercedes Carlton of Oprah.com and invited to be one of the three professors who would lead the discussions of the Faulkner novels. I eagerly accepted the invitation to teach As I Lay Dying, thrilled to be a part of an endeavor that would introduce Faulkner to legions of new readers. My excitement was understandable and, I believe, justified. For example, consider this: if only one of every ten of the alleged 600,000 members of OBC joined me in reading As I Lay Dying, that would still amount to more than seven times the number of students I had taught in my entire forty-year teaching career. Oprah’s “Faulkner 101” would be by far the largest class I had ever taught! As the subtitle of Kathleen Rooney’s Reading with Oprah suggests, OBC is “The Book Club That Changed America.” From its beginning in 1996 it grew into the largest book club in the world. Until 2002, Winfrey focused upon contemporary writers and devoted some of the telecasts of the immensely popular Oprah Winfrey Show to the promotion and discussion of the books. In 2003, however, Winfrey shifted the focus of OBC to “classic” authors of the past and moved the discussions from on-airtoonline,directingthereadingsprimarilythroughtheOprah.com website. The first classic work to be selected for the new format was John Steinbeck’s East of Eden; that novel was followed in succeeding months by Gabriel García-Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1 An earlier version of this essay appeared in the William Faulkner Journal of Japan 8 (April 2006): 4-13. 382 Robert W. Hamblin Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Then, after a hiatus of several months in which considerablecuriositywasarousedconcerningwhatOprah’snextchoice of title would be, came the announcement that not one, but three Faulkner novels would be the Summer 2005 featured selections. No less for classic writers than for contemporary ones, selection as the focus of the OBC typically catapults an author to the top of the best-seller lists. All of the contemporary novels recommended by Winfrey sold more than a million copies, and her first choice of a classic, East of Eden, became a number one best-seller. Within twenty-four hours following Winfrey’s announcement of her choice of Faulkner, the boxed set of three Vintage paperbacks climbed to number two on the best-seller list, trailing only J. K. Rowling’s announced Harry Potter sequel. Such is the influence of the individual whom Forbes magazine ranked as number one on its 2005 list of the one hundred top celebrities in the world. That influence was the result of producing and hosting the top-ranked talk show for eighteen consecutive years—one that was televised in more than two hundred American markets and more than one hundred foreign countries. Little wonder that Joseph Urgo, then chairman of the English department at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Faulkner’s hometown, called Winfrey’s Summer of Faulkner “the best thing that’s happened to Faulkner since the Nobel Prize” (personal email). Like each of the other professors selected to participate in the project—Thadious Davis of the University of Pennsylvania, who taught The Sound and the Fury; and Arnold Weinstein of Brown University, who...