William Faulkner
William Faulkner was born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was a time when there were two Souths in the United States. The first was the South whose beliefs had existed from before the American Civil War which began in eighteen sixty-one. r4i sdhcThis South did not question rules, even when those rules did not satisfy human needs. It was a South filled with injustice for black people. It held the seeds of its own destruction. The other South was a land without any beliefs. It was drop shippinga place where success was measured by self-interest. This was a South where each person had lost his place in the group. It was a place where people owned things that they did not know how to use. Faulkner saw that the old beliefs were not right or even worthCast steel believing. And he saw that they could not provide justice because they were based on slavery. Yet he felt that even with their lies and half truths the old beliefs were better than the moral emptiness of the modern South.
VOICE TWO: In Faulkner's story called "The Bear" a group of men discount clothingare talking after the day's hunt. One man reads from a poem by the English writer, John Keats: "'She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair. ' "He's talking about a girl," one man says. The other answers, 'He was talking about truth. fan gearTruth is one. It doesn't change. It covers all things which touch the heart -- honor and pity and justice and courage and love. Do you see now. '" The American writer, Robert Penn Warren says china jewelryabout Faulkner, "The important thing is the presence of the idea of truth. It covers all things that involve the heart and define the effort of man to rise above the mechanical process of life. "
VOICE ONE: Faulkner has been accused of looking back towholesale wedding dresses a time when life was better. Yet, he believes that truth belongs to all times. But it is found most often in the people who stand outside what he calls "the loud world. " One of the people in his story "Delta Autumn" says, "There are good men everywhere, at all times. " Faulkner's great-grandfather accepted the oldwholesale wedding dressesbeliefs. He was one of the men who had helped build the South, but his time was gone. Now money had replaced the old order of honor. What Faulkner saw was that there could be no order at all, no idea of doing what is right, in a world that measured success in terms of money.
VOICE TWO: This is the changing South that Faulkner describes in the area he created. He named it Yoknapatawpha County. He describes it as in the northern part of the state of Mississippi. It lies between sand hills covered with pine trees and richprom dresses farmland near the Mississippi River. It has fifteen-thousand-six-hundred-eleven people, living on almost four-thousand square kilometers. Its central city is Jefferson, where the storekeepers, mechanics, and professional men live. The rest of the people of Yoknapatawpha County are farmers or men who cut trees. Their only crops are wood and cotton. A few live in big farmhouses, left from an earlier time. Most of them do not even own the land they farm. The critic Malcolm Cowley says, "Others might say that Faulkner was not so much writing stories for the public as telling them to himself. It is what a lonely child might do, or a great writer. "