Besides the groundbreaking novels and stories that brought him fame William Faulkner throughout his life wrote letters to his publisher his lovers his family and his friends In this first major study of epistolarity in Faulkner s work James G Watson examines Faulkner s personal correspondence as a unique second canon of writing separate from his literary canon with its many fictional letters but developing along parallel lines By describing the similarity of forms and conventions in Faulkner s personal and fictional correspondence Watson clearly demonstrates that Faulkner s personal experience as a writer of letters significantly shaped his imaginative work early and late Letters are always about themselves they re create a world between the sender and the receiver In this illuminating study Faulkner s personal letters are treated as a form of reflexive writing first person narratives in which Sender self consciously portrays Self to a specific Receiver likewise portrayed in the letter text This duality of actual experience and imaginative re creation measures the personal distances between the life of the writer and the written self image It reveals that letters are at once fragments of autobiography and fictions of self Such laws of letters apply equally to the letters that appear throughout Faulkner s novels and stories The twenty one letters and telegrams in The Sound and the Fury for example portray character propel plot and convey important themes of failed communication and broken identity From Soldiers Pay to his last work Faulkner s carefully lettered canon of fiction is dramatic evidence of his understanding of epistolarity and of the extent to which he adapted letters including some of his own to shape his fictional world

William Faulkner, Letters and Fictions PDF

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