Faulkner and His Contemporaries edited by Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J.
Abadie with essays by Houston A. Baker, Jr., Deborah Clarke, Grace
Elizabeth Hale, W. Kenneth Holditch, M. Thomas Inge and Donaria Romeiro
Carvalho Inge, Donald M. Kartiganer, George Monteiro, Daniele
Pitavy-Souques, Peggy Whitman Prenshaw, Merrill Maguire Skaggs, and
Joseph R. Urgo Although he spent the bulk of his life in Oxford,
Mississippi-far removed from the intellectual centers of modernism and
the writers who created it-William Faulkner (1897-1962) proved to be one
of the American novelists who most comprehensively grasped modernism. In
his fiction he tested its tenets in the most startling and insightful
ways. What, then, did such contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, Eudora
Welty, and Walker Evans think of his work? How did his times affect and
accept what he wrote? Faulkner and His Contemporaries explores the
relationship between the Nobel laureate, ensconced in his "postage stamp
of native soil," and the world of letters within which he created his
masterpieces. In this anthology, essays focus on such topics as how
Faulkner's literary antecedents (in particular, Willa Cather and Joseph
Conrad) influenced his writing, his literary/aesthetic feud with rival
Ernest Hemingway, and the common themes he shares with fellow
southerners Welty and Evans. Several essays examine the environment in
which Faulkner worked. Deborah Clarke concentrates on the rise of the
automobile industry. W. Kenneth Holditch shows how the city of New
Orleans acted as a major force in Faulkner's fiction, and Grace
Elizabeth Hale examines how the civil rights era of Faulkner's later
career compelled him to deal with his ideas about race and rebellion in
new ways. Joseph R. Urgo is dean of the faculty at Hamilton College in
Clinton, New York. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for
the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
