Faulkner's biographers: Life, art, and the poetics of biography (William Faulkner)

William Faulkner, arguably the most important American writer of the twentieth century and creator of the magical/mythical world of Yoknapatawpha, has generated a host of major biographical studies—each acclaimed more “major” and “definitive” than the previous. This dissertation examines the relation between the life of Faulkner and his work through biographies of Faulkner, which form a complex and rich body of critical literature that is almost as challenging as that of the texts themselves. My argument focuses on the manner in which biography can rewrite the art and how in each new biography the story of Faulkner changes. Each new biography “swerves,” to use Harold Bloom's term, from the father-biographer, Joseph Blotner. We observe that each biographer follows Levi-Strauss's notion of discourse as bricolage, putting together all the facts and fictions of the previous biographers.; Defending the genre of biography, I will argue, as Richard Gray does, that Faulkner's works “brim with an often undisclosed biography that is at once personal and cultural.” In addition to analysis of the major biographies on Faulkner by Joseph Bloner, Judith Bryant Wittenberg, David Minter, Stephen B. Oates, Frederick R. Karl, Joel Williamson, Richard Gray, and Daniel Singal, this project considers early biographical essays on Faulkner and their constructions of the artist. Included in this category are critics Malcolm Cowley, Michael Millgate, Carvel Collins, James B. Meriwether, and Maurice Edgar Coindreau. The influence of memoirs by Faulkner's friends and family is also examined. My synthesis of the biographies form another layer of interpretation of the life and works, adding to the palimpsest—itself defined as writing material (as a parchment) used after the erasure of earlier writing.