The Saddest Words

How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, one of America’s most preeminent literary critics.

Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation’s history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world.

Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works’ echo of “Lost Cause” romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.

About the Author: The author of Portrait of a Novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.

“Michael Gorra is one of the finest critical minds at work in literature today, and this masterly reassessment of William Faulkner could not be more timely. Faulkner is a central figure in American fiction and, indeed, in American history, a voice as resonant in today's troubled world as it was in his own time. Gorra asks hard questions about the novelist and the man, and is unflinching in answering them. This is a momentous and thrilling book.”

- John Banville

“Where did William Faulkner go? The preeminent Southern novelist of the twentieth century, Faulkner was born and died in Jim Crow Mississippi. He was as preoccupied with race as most white Mississippians, and not in ways that make for a comfortable fit with our attitudes today. Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words is a deeply learned, deeply felt, unflinching reconsideration of Faulkner, which ought to bring his life and work back into the twenty-first century conversation, where it deserves to be.”

- Nicholas Lemann, author of Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream

“Beautifully written, The Saddest Words chronicles with grace the way the Civil War's inner meaning, its pain and its racial landscape spoke to its own unconventional chronicler, William Faulkner, who said, fatefully, that the past is never dead. And Michael Gorra animates that past in a literary criticism at its hybrid best: contextual, historical, biographical, resonant and eminently shrewd.”

- Brenda Wineapple, author of The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation

“The audacity of Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words takes my breath away. Each of his bold wagers would be sufficient risk for most writers: treating all of Faulkner’s dazzling works as a single enormous book; using the Civil War to illuminate Faulkner’s work, and Faulkner, in turn, to illuminate that harrowing, never-quite-ended war; treating Faulkner’s very limitations as an unsparing key to our own enduring dilemmas. The rich weave of Gorra’s book, shuttling nimbly among biography, history, criticism, social commentary, and travel, is so complex that you think it couldn’t possibly yield a coherent pattern. And yet, the uncanny result of this perfectly pitched and exquisitely written book is that Faulkner, that multifaceted genius, has never come across so clearly and so powerfully before.”

- Christopher Benfey, author of If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years