William Faulkner: His Life and Work

"Any future Faulkner biographerÑand there will be others, rest assured of thatÑwill find it difficult to surpass what Minter has accomplished."ÑJonathan Yardley In this highly acclaimed biography, David Minter draws upon a wealth of material, including the novelist's essays, interviews, published and unpublished letters, as well as his poems, stories, and novels, to illuminate the close relationship between the flawed life and the artistic achievement of one of twentieth-century America's most complex literary figures. In the process, he reveals a Faulkner who is powerful, vulnerable, realÑevery bit as fascinating as the characters he created. Anyone who has ever tarried in Yoknapatawpha County will find this a sensitive and readable account of the novelist's struggles in art and life. In his new preface, Minter locates his biography in relation to the changes in the literary critical landscape during the 1980s and discusses its departures from New Critical tenets about the relationship between authors' lives and their works. "An excellent book . . . It sets forth, often very sensitively, the elements of Faulkner's personality that make the fictional universe of Yoknapatawpha County assume the forms it takes in the major novels."ÑLouis D. Rubin, Jr. "One emerges from reading [Minter's book] with a fresh understanding of Faulkner both as man and writer, with feelings of sympathy and, even more, admiration."ÑRichard Gray, Times Higher Education Supplement "The great virtue of David Minter's book is that he knows that the question of who a man was is less interesting than that of whom he wished to become . . . It is in the poems and the novels that we can trace the self to which Faulkner aspired."ÑLachlan Mackinnon, Times Literary Supplement