Word: faulkner
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...When Faulkner finished the convict's story, however, he felt that it was incomplete. He therefore wrote another novel and inserted the chapters between chapters of the convict's tale. This second novel tells of a young New Orleans doctor who runs off with another man's wife. When she becomes pregnant he performs an abortion, as a result of which she dies and he is jailed for life...
...miserable sequence of events he goes through contrasts with the nightmarish but still exhilarating adventures of the convict. It does not come off: the doctor and his mistress are not credible characters, the prose is turgid and confusing. But not even careless writing can weaken the cumulative effect of Faulkner's imaginative fertility, the boldness and originality of his themes...
Background. William Faulkner's great-grandfather entered northern Mississippi, so the legend has it, at the age of ten. Colonel William Falkner (the name is spelled both ways) ran away from his home at Middleton, Tenn., walked several hundred miles to Ripley, near Oxford, to stay with an uncle. He found the uncle in jail, charged with murder. He sat down on the courthouse steps and "swore he would some day build a railroad along the route he had walked...
Drifter. The family wealth died with him. William Faulkner's grandfather moved the family to Oxford, where William, the eldest of four sons, grew up in indolence, his romantic contributions to the local literary magazine, The Double Dealer, for the amount of liquor he drank...
When Miss Prall, who had recently married Sherwood Anderson, came to New Orleans, Faulkner visited her, became Anderson's close friend. He turned to novels, under Anderson's influence, wrote Soldiers' Pay. Mrs. Anderson volunteered to get Sherwood to read the book, to recommend it to Publisher Horace Liveright if he liked it. Next day she brought it back, saying. "Sherwood says if he isn't required to read this, he'll try to get Liveright to publish it." Liveright accepted it, gave Faulkner advances of $200 apiece on the next two. He dashed...