Author Description

It appears that Faulkner's difficulty and innovativeness, more than anything else, precluded more widespread approval before World War II, as similar qualities have limited more recently the readership of Pynchon and Hawkes. His style combines the rhetorical extravagance of the Renaissance and the nineteenth century with the rhetorical discontinuity of modernism, and filters them through the alembics of a Mississippi drawl and the common ramble of everyday speech. To some his original methods and involuted style, if comprehended at all, seemed mere technical virtuosity. He did have support among writers and critics, several of whom considered him the most exciting literary figure of the day. - Introduction.