Karl draws upon his familiarity with modern literature to move casually through the novelist's life, examining the literary, historical and psychological forces that shaped his fiction. The author of a highly acclaimed biography of Joseph Conrad and an ambitious study of modernism, Mr. Karl's magisterial new biography triumphantly succeeds. It neither provided a satisfying critical appraisal of his work, nor attempted to untangle the secret workings of his imagination. Karl's estimation, ''the closest figure to a Balzac that America has produced,'' ''the first of the American moderns in fiction.''Īlthough Joseph Blotner's voluminous biography of Faulkner, published in 1974, gave us two volumes of minutely detailed facts about the novelist, it did palpably little to illuminate the connections between Faulkner's life and art. Not only did he magically transplant the modernist innovations of Europe to native ground, but he also made the postage stamp-sized piece of Mississippi soil he called home yield fresh and enduring myths - myths that would define both the predicament of the post-Civil War South and the condition of America as it entered the turbulent 20th century.
In a single decade, with ''The Sound and the Fury'' (1929), ''As I Lay Dying'' (1930), ''Light in August'' (1932) and ''Absalom, Absalom!'' (1936), William Faulkner irrevocably changed the geography of American literature. William Faulkner: American Writer A Biography By Frederick R.
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