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Joel Williamson, a historian well-known for his examination of southern race relations since the Civil War, has brought his historical knowledge, his skills as a detective, and his insight into the southern psyche to bear on one of the major figures in southern literature. Scholars and readers of William Faulkner who have not worked through the last several biographies and the multitude of monographs and essays that have accumulated since Joseph Blotner's massive two-volume account appeared two decades ago may be dismayed to. see yet another big Faulkner book appear. One of Mississippi's most prolific enterprises has been the Faulkner industry, whose products include a vast and expanding body of criticism, biographies, corrected editions of the master's works, films about the author and his Mississippi home, a musical play, conferences and symposia, a newsletter on teaching Faulkner, and--not least--an annual Faux Faulkner contest sponsored by American Airlines.
The finished products are turned out primarily in academic shops across the nation--indeed, around the globe. A Faulkner conference in Beijing last year was only the latest of many such international affairs. No American author remains more renowned or more studied at home or abroad. Each August for the past twenty years hundreds of Faulkner scholars and a remarkable number of devotees from all walks of American life come, along with others from Asia and Europe, to gather in Oxford, Mississippi, for the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss. High school and college students, if they haven't read anything else in American literature, can usually cite something by Faulkner that they have read.
Recent efforts of literary scholars to explode the canon of great authors and works, or to declare the death of the author, seem not to have slowed the elevation of William Faulkner into what Michael Kreyling has called "our Shakespeare"--the "Divine Mr. F." This white southern male, whose life was marked by incorrigible womanizing, alcoholism, and mixed feelings toward blacks, and whose fictional characters exhibit all manner of misogynist and racist behavior, has so far survived an era of fastidioas political correctness that has laid waste to canonical figures with lesser flaws.
Perhaps most striking in the Faulkner industry's work is the inattention...