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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.
Reviews
"Gorra's book, as he writes in his preface, is 'an act of citizenship,' timely and essential as we confront, once again, the question of who is a citizen and who among us should enjoy its privileges."
"And here we are again."
"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."
"This is only to touch the surface of this fine book which, while sharply focused on Faulkner's writing, is broad in the scope of its research ..."
"Toward the end of The Saddest Words, Gorra quotes W.E.B."
"A magisterial, multidisciplinary study of Faulkner that shakes the dust off his canonization."
"This is surely the first account of Faulkner's work that provides a systematic reading of Confederate historiography—the version that Faulkner would have imbibed growing up."
"In fact, it's not even past,' and this exceptional study by Gorra lends credence to these words."
"Gorra's argument, however, depends on close readings of everything from individual sentences to symbols and characters and themes across the author's novels, which collectively make the case that a racist person can be a radical writer."
"Yet that clarity was always challenged in the fetid Mississippi air that Faulkner, like all his characters, had to breathe."
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