by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 20, 2008   Last Updated: February 26, 2009

William Faulkner rarely left the small town of Oxford, Mississippi where he moved when he was four. But when he won the Nobel Prize for literature, Faulkner explained that he'd toiled in "the agony and sweat of the human spirit." He spoke later of "sublimating the actual into the apocryphal," which he did by creating the fictitious Mississippi region of Yoknapatawpha County, and then penning over 18 major novels which all took place there. For his sixth book, "Absalom, Absalom," Faulkner even drew a map of the county, identifying himself at the bottom as its "sole owner and proprietor."

Faulkner clung to a rich internal life, and once said that the county appeared in his imagination all at once, in a flash, and he spent the rest of his life chronicling it. While the region was small and its people insignificant, Faulkner told one interviewer that he viewed it as "a kind of keystone in the universe... if it were ever taken away, the universe itself would collapse." Faulkner was prone to grand pronouncements, but his humble characters captured a pain that felt so genuine it almost felt absolute, making them feel not just universal, but real and undeniable.

Faulkner is sometimes placed in the "southern gothic" tradition - writing stories about grand hopes and dreams which crumbled into horrific meaninglessness. But Faulkner's starting premise was a deep cynicism even about those original dreams, and some characters seem trapped from the beginning without hope or even a hint of hope, trapped simply by their fear, their poverty, their mortality, racism, or just a fatal bitterness. (For example, the grand mansion revered by the townspeople was the only status symbol that a wandering drifter had ever seen, and when he became a man he built his own mansion without any feeling of a larger meaning.)

Faulkner understood how a community can offer up a social setting that's of no use to an individual with their unique private pains. He wrote about the Civil War, but even more about the generations that followed and lived with the family legends and disappointments. One Civil War legend haunts a family straight through World War I, leading a reckless son inexorably to his death, with no one in his family able to stop him.

But there was more to Faulkner than just sweeping, multi-generational stories. Faulkner also captured brilliantly the speaking patterns of these doomed and unhappy people. As the elderly Rosa Coldfield lectures young Quentin Compson, her story rambles in an

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