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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
"A magisterial, multidisciplinary study of Faulkner that shakes the dust off his canonization."
"he writes with clarity and grace, producing a work that is deep and learned without being deformed by jargon or academic costiveness ..."
"This tangle aside, Gorra's book is rich in insight ..."
"Gorra seems to want to give Faulkner credit for consistently acknowledging a problem that he did virtually nothing about ..."
"Gorra could not have foreseen our current moment when he began this work of biography, history and literary criticism."
"Gorra adroitly and poignantly portrays Faulkner at war with himself, juxtaposed and entwined with the history of a cleaved nation, to provide a compelling and necessary reexamination of a towering literary figure."
"In The Saddest Words, Gorra posits that Quentin represents Faulkner's view of tragedy as recurrence."
"rich, complex, and eloquent ..."
"Gorra does not try to defend the indefensible."
"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 ..."
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