William Faulkner was a white Southerner creatively obsessed with problems of personal identity, social change, region, sexuality, race, and that elaborate circuitry of passion and power, the family. Throughout his life, Faulkner was driven to pursue elusive objects of desire that seemed to lose their desirability the closer he came to them. For much of his life he also felt impelled to speak out against racial injustice in a way that made him many enemies in the South and even alienated members of his own family. In this reassessment of Faulkner, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited and to reveal just how intimately woven together were the tangled threads of Faulkner's personal and public experience - the privacy that Faulkner cherished and the history in which, whether he liked it or not, he was ensnared. Attending closely to each of the novels Gray shows how they contain an often undisclosed biography that is at once personal and cultural. he also shows how those novels speak to, and sometimes for, each of us today as individual human subjects and historical agents - confronted with the same stubborn problems and similar choices.
