Description
Michael Gorra, one of America’s most preeminent literary critics, asks how we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century.
Michael Gorra asks provocative questions in this historic portrait of William Faulkner and his world. He explores whether William Faulkner should still be read in this new century and asks what his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, the central quarrel in America’s history.
Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works’ echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualises Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.
Reviews
"Michael Gorra is one of the finest critical minds at work in literature today, and this masterly reassessment of William Faulkner could not be more timely. Faulkner is a central figure in American fiction and, indeed, in American history, a voice as resonant in today's troubled world as it was in his own time. Gorra asks hard questions about the novelist and the man, and is unflinching in answering them. This is a momentous and thrilling book." — John Banville
"Gorra’s complex and thought-provoking meditation on Faulkner is rich in insight, making the case for the novelist’s literary achievement and his historical value — as an unparalleled chronicler of slavery’s aftermath, and its damage to America’s psyche." — 100 Notable Books of 2020, The New York Times Book Review
Also By: Michael Gorra 
As I Lay Dying: A Norton Critical Edition
Second Edition, Paperback, 2022
The Portrait of a Lady: A Norton Critical Edition
First Edition, Paperback, 2017
Henry James’s most famous novel edited by the critically acclaimed author of Portrait of a Novel.
The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition
Third Edition, Paperback, 2014
“A man is the sum of his misfortunes.”
—William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
Paperback, 2013
“...literary criticism at its most lucid and engaging, as it shows James embarking on his great work and displays Gorra, filled with enthusiasm and insight, as the book’s most ideal and intelligent...
Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece
Hardback, 2012
A revelatory biography of the American master as told through the lens of his greatest novel.
