Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction

In 1944, William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley, “I’m telling the same story over and over which is myself and the world. That’s all a writer ever does, he tells his own biography in a thousand different terms.”<P>With these words, Faulkner suggests that what changes in the course of his prolific novel-writing career is not so much the content but the style, “the thousand different terms” of his fiction. The essays in <i>Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction</i>, first presented at the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi, focus on Faulkner’s narrative inventiveness, on how Faulkner, like his character Benjy in <i>The Sound and the Fury</i>, relentlessly kept “trying to say.”<P>The contributors, authorities on Faulkner’s narrative, offer a wide variety of critical approaches to Faulkner’s fiction-writing process. Cleanth Brooks, for example, applies the strategies of New Criticism to Faulkner’s rendering of the heroic and pastoral modes; Judith L. S