FAULKNER, William
(1897–1962)
FAULKNER, William (25 September 1897–6 July 1962). Faulkner seemed so stupid, in person and at times in print, while conservative critics were predisposed to overpraise his conventional virtues, that we tend to forget he wrote some of the greatest avant-garde fiction of the twentieth century. I’m thinking initially of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), both with multiple narrators, each so radically different in intelligence (and thus style) from the others, and then of…