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Faulkner brings alive the Southern preoccupation with the past and the sickness of living in memories. He teaches again and again the fear and the reality of miscegenation, and he makes comprehensive the sexual hysteria behind the myth of Southern white womanhood. He can extort reluctant under standing for a code of grim and instant violence.
Faulkner also knew the gropings and costs of conciliation, and the difficulty and urgency of arousing men of good will to action. He spoke of the future not as a social scientist with a blueprint and a program, but as a novelist of "the human heart in conflict with itself"—as he said when he received the No bel Prize. Thus his hopes are implicit in the psychology of the characters he created and in the moral judgments he requires the reader to make. And what he seemed to hope was that out of the heart in conflict, out of the crisis of conscience, could come a new reverence for the land and all its people, and a voluntary recognition by the individual white Southerner of the humanity of the individual Negro. He put his faith in the generation now coming to maturity to go much farther than its fathers.
For those who had ears to hear, Faulkner was offering these things more than a quarter-century ago, back when the public that was embracing Gone With the Wind could dismiss the South's sporadic violence (119 lynchings in the '30s) and constant racial repression as merely a peculiar regional problem. Faulkner himself was often treated as a strictly regional writer.
In 1945, just five years before he won the Nobel Prize, nearly all his novels were out of print. Many white Southerners still turn away from him as difficult, gothic and horror-ridden, loaded down with a guilt they claim they do not feel. Yet today William Faulkner is the one writer—sociologist, historian or novelist, Southerner or Northerner, white or Negro—who is inescapably relevant to a compassionate understanding of the Southern crisis.
Born & Bred. Halfway through the writing of his third novel, Sartor is, he had a vision: "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. I created a cosmos of my own." He called it Yoknapatawpha County and set it down in the rolling pine hills and cotton-rich valley bottoms of northeastern Mississippi, 80 miles from Memphis, Tenn., named its county seat Jefferson, and peopled its 2,400 sq. mi. with 15,611 residents—"Whites, 6,298; Negroes, 9,313. William Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor."
Faulkner set 15 of his 19 novels in Yoknapatawpha County. He drew its map, crisscrossed its landscape in his stories, plotted the intricate genealogies of some of its families for four and five generations, told and retold its legends, and searched out its history back to its original Indian inhabitants.