Remember That Time Faulkner Came To Our School? It's got other folks who feel the same way.Ĭheck out the Faux Faulkner competition. Here's what the fine folks at the Nobel Foundation have to say about him. In case you've got a serious Faulkner crush…

Ole Miss (that's the University of Mississippi, in case you didn't know) has a site with all sorts of Faulkner goodies. As a nation, we also still face questions that plagued the town of Jefferson – questions such as how to deal with the legacies of slavery, state-sanctioned racism, and gender discrimination. In the United States, we still wrestle with issues of who counts as an insider or an outsider – we only need to look at debates on immigration reform and the hot topic of gay marriage for two prime examples of how the question of American normalcy is still being fiercely debated. Not to get all political, but there are also other reasons why this story of lonely outcasts still matters. Similarly, Hightower eventually learns that the path to true self-knowledge is careful, deep introspection that could never come from running away rather, we must relentlessly face ourselves in all of our flaws if we're ever going to reach the kind of self-knowledge that Christmas yearned for. Then, on the flip side, characters like Lena and Byron live in the present, admit their shortcomings, and believe in remaining responsible to the people they've allowed into their lives. On the one hand, Christmas runs away from his problems and reacts violently to his own discomfort. Joe Christmas is a character in search of himself – and who can't relate to that journey? Light in August presents a cautionary tale of proper and improper ways to find oneself. What is Light in August About and Why Should I Care? His work was so brilliant, in fact, that the good folks at the Nobel Foundation awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949.

Once Sanctuary made it big, folks started realizing that Faulkner's other work was actually technically (and emotionally) brilliant. Sanctuary is a potboiler of a novel, one with lots of alcohol and sex and violence. Light in August was published after Faulkner gained a wide readership 1931, when he published Sanctuary. The so-called Yoknapatawpha novels are linked by their shared location, but they're also linked by certain themes and concerns, such as the legacy of slavery, the persistence of memory, and the South's struggle to come to terms with its defeat in the Civil War, among others.

Like The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, and As I Lay Dying, Light in August takes place in Faulkner's fictional Yoknapatawpha County (say that five times fast). Published in 1932, William Faulkner's Light in August chronicles the life and death of Joe Christmas, a man of ambiguous racial ancestry.

Light in august book