William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

If you would find the imaginative equivalents of certain civil rights figures in American writing, Rosa Parks and James Meredith say, you don’t go to most fiction by Negroes, but to Faulkner.

Ralph Ellison, ‘A Very Stern Discipline’ (1965)

I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. Faulkner, Paris Review interview 1956

Map of Yoknapatawpha Co.drawn by William Faulkner (1945)

Light in August, first ed. 1932

Reconstruction and Its Aftermath

Reconstruction (1865-1877):• Abolitionists• Freedmen• Carpetbaggers• White Man’s Burden• White Supremacy• Jim Crow• “One Drop Rule”• Miscegenation

“…you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level. I see that now, which I did not see until I came down here. But escape it you cannot. The curse of the black race is God’s curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen because He once cursed him.” Light in August

Race and Blood

“He didn't know what he was, and so he was nothing. He deliberately evicted himself from the human race because he didn't know what he was. . . That to me was the tragic, central idea of the story. . .” William Faulkner at the University of Virginia, 1957

Old South, New South and Religion

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.” Leviticus 19:18

John Steuart Curry, Tragic Prelude (1938-40)