The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War

Smith College English professor Gorra (Portrait of a Novel) examines the Civil War as the “all-determining absence” at the center of William Faulkner’s life (1897–1962) and work in this immersive and enlightening account. Blending history, travelogue, biography, and literary analysis, Gorra treats the Yoknapatawpha novels and stories as a “single enormous text” spanning the 1830s to the 1930s, and moves back and forth between Faulkner’s fictional universe and real-world events during the same time frame. Gorra visits the battlefield at Gettysburg to walk the path of Pickett’s Charge, notes that Faulkner’s most fecund period (from the late 1920s to the early 1940s) coincided with “the heights of Confederate hagiography,” and finds parallels between W.E.B. Du Bois’s views on race and Reconstruction and those expressed in Faulkner’s fiction. Gorra sees characters including Ike McCaslin, Bayard Sartoris, and Quentin Compson as reflective of Faulkner’s personal attempts to reconcile his Southern heritage with his rejection of the principles behind slavery, though he remains clear-eyed about the novelist’s “incoherence” on the civil rights movement. Fluidly written, expertly researched, and brilliantly conceived, this is an essential reckoning with Faulkner’s art and the legacy of the Civil War. (Aug.)