A Summer with my Favorite Author
I will admit it.

I have never watched Oprah on television. Thankfully, my wife is a fan. Otherwise I would have missed this opportunity to spend time with my favorite author – William Faulkner.

I was introduced to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County while I was in college. Back then I was asked to read The Sound and the Fury. I will admit I was more than a little confused with what I was later to learn was Faulkner’s hallmark shifting of the narration from one character to another; his disorienting disruptions of a timely chronology.

As I read more, I began to appreciate the genius behind the technique. It was like my days as a newspaper reporter. Each witness to a story had his or her version of what had happened. The more I dug, the more likely I was to emerge with a story that resembled the true event.
While Faulkner’s narration and characters appear complex, his themes are simple. He writes about life’s great issues – life and death, good and evil, love and hate, wealth and poverty, individual and family, sanity and insanity, success and failure.

Faulkner's characters speak to their ability to transcend their settings and endure their sufferings. They emerge pained, yet ennobled.

Although I am not fond of the heat and humidity, I am looking forward to spending a portion of my summer’s reading time in the Mississippi hill country of Yoknapatawpha County. ( )

http://chef-doeuvre.blogspot.com/2007... ( )

There are no reviews so far of this collection. However, each novel individually will yield a host of reviews. Anyway, I'm not brave enough to review Faulkner. I'll just quote Robert Penn Warren: "For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country."

and Eudora Welty: "No man ever put more of his heat and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about the heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there."

I've read much about him. Once, when he was in Hollywood, he was invited to play golf with Clark Gable. Gableasked him, "Do you write?" Sometime later, Faulkner asked Gable, "And you, Mr. Gable, what do you do? Act?