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The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War
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About This Book
Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.
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Reviews
"Faulkner had his flaws, Gorra writes, but he 'gets the big things right' ..."
"'Faulkner the man shared many of the closed society's opinions and values,' Gorra writes."
"And yet The Saddest Words, for all its peculiar accents, also serves as a kind of one-stop-Faulkner-shop, offering all the traditional lore ..."
"Gorra expertly mines his own deep reading of the Faulkner oeuvre to serve as our Virgil and guide us through an exploration of how the Civil War influenced Faulkner's work and how, in turn, Faulkner's writing helped shape modern literature."
"he writes with clarity and grace, producing a work that is deep and learned without being deformed by jargon or academic costiveness ..."
"Yet his extended meditation on whether and why we should continue to read the work of a privileged White novelist from Jim Crow Mississippi often seems to describe exactly where we are ..."
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