A Faulkner Profile : The Man and the Writer : 6

In this major new work by Professor Pratt he writes: "In New Orleans in the early 1920s, when William Faulkner and Roark Bradford were young writers trying to make their mark in the world, Faulkner told his friend, 'I hope to be the only unregimented and unrecorded individual left in the world.' It was his ambition to be forgotten as a man and to live only in his work. He held to that ambition for a long time, evading publicity and giving misleading answers to interviewers who sought him out, but fame caught up with him eventually, and forced him to acknowledge that readers interested in his work would naturally want to know more about the author. He might prefer anonymity, but he could not escape fame. For years he struggled to earn a living as a writer, and only when his books began to sell did he realize that his originality as a writer would lead readers to seek the source of it, to be curious about the personality of the man who possessed such an astonishing command of words." / From the start, Faulkner cultivated a style that was elusive and difficult, consciously original in technique and intellectually challenging, choosing his words carefully in ways that were baffling to many readers. Yet he succeeded to an astonishing degree in appealing to a wider and wider circle of readers. He did so by becoming a major participant in the movement that dominated twentieth century literature - the Age of Modernism. / In literature, Modernism was chiefly the creation of three major poets and three major novelists: Yeats, Pound, and Eliot, and the novelists Joyce, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Together, they fashioned a new literary style out of a variety of personal styles. Through collaborating or interacting with each other they produced, in the first half of the twentieth century, a series of masterpieces in poetry and fiction. Hemingway and Faulkner were the youngest and last to acquire a world audience. What they learned from the older Modernists was how to intrigue, mystify, and induce readers to enter into a poem or story so deeply that they would experience what the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé had earlier called "the delicious joy of believing he is creating" the very work he is reading. / The works and personality of the great novelist are much illuminated by this remarkable book.