Becoming Faulkner The Art and Life of William Faulkner

William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Repeatedly, he failed to master the challenges that erupted upon him in charged moments: crises involving love, war, and race, as well as the airplane, Hollywood, and alcohol. In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein--a leading authority on Faulkner--targets Faulkner's sense of unpreparedness as central to both his life and his work. The discontinuities that marked his life (its failed becoming) reappear in the turbulence and outrage that make his work so powerful. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and racial division--take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. Becoming Faulkner joins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving us a compelling portrait of this twentieth-century literary genius.

Philip M. Weinstein is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swathmore College.