Michael Gorra

Passing your eyes over those first, electric sentences, it occurs to you that his readers are still catching up.

In Yoknapatawpha County, the past never speaks with a single voice.

Faulkner’s chroniclers have to reconcile the novelist’s often repellent political positions with the extraordinary meditations on race, violence, and cruelty in his fiction.

That’s why the privileged White novelist’s work is still worth reading, Michael Gorra argues.

A white man of the Jim Crow South, he couldn’t escape the burden of race, yet derived creative force from it.