Faulkner and Love
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The Women Who Shaped His Art, A Biography
Judith L. Sensibar
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Format: ClothPrice: $45.00
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The deeply moving, untold story of America’s greatest twentieth-century novelist and the three women at the center of his imaginative life
This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his life—his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and the childhood friend who became his wife, Estelle Oldham. In this new exploration of Faulkner’s creative process, Judith L. Sensibar discovers that these women’s relationships with Faulkner were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. Sensibar brings to the foreground—as Faulkner did—this “female world,” an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography.
Through extensive research in untapped biographical sources—archival materials and interviews with these women's families and other members of the communities in which they lived—Sensibar transcends existing scholarship and reconnects Faulkner’s biography to his work. She demonstrates how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships with women. Sensibar alters and enriches our understanding not only of Faulkner, his art, and the complex world of the American South that came to life in his brilliant fiction but also of darknesses, fears, and unspokens that Faulkner unveiled in the American psyche.
"Exploring the emotional and creative energies Faulkner derived from his close relationships with three generations of white and black women, Judith Sensibar provides a decidedly original and revealing portrait of his life and his writing."—Eric J. Sundquist, author of Faulkner: The House Divided
“A remarkable work of sleuthing, researching, and interpreting. Sensibar has used every resource in print, and has buttressed all that information with countless oral interviews to provide a myriad of insights into Faulkner.”—Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
"The portrait of Faulkner that emerges from this book is layered, complex, and absolutely fascinating. Sensibar offers a new way of apprehending his world and of understanding how he was shaped as a thinker and writer."—Thadious Davis, University of Pennsylvania
Publication Date: April 7, 2009
75 b/w illus.
