OSHER 280 - William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Saga

In 1945, all but one of William Faulkner's novels were out of print. He was working in Hollywood as a script writer when Viking Press hired literary critic and scholar Malcolm Cowley to edit an anthology of his work for their Portable series. As Cowley gathered and organized his selection of short stories and excerpts from Faulkner's novels, he realized that Faulkner's work, taken as a whole, formed a saga of the author's fictional Mississippi county. Accordingly, Cowley arranged his selections for The Portable Faulkner in a chronological pattern and wrote an introduction that reveals the full range of Faulkner's artistic vision. The Portable Faulkner was a financial success and helped revive Faulkner's literary career. Four years later he won the Nobel Prize. In this course, we will read and discuss a selection of the stories included in The Portable Faulkner, now published as a Penguin Classic, ISBN 978- 0142437285.