Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Faulkner, William (Cuthbert) - Robert Penn Warren

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ROBERT PENN WARREN

It was in the Spring of 1929 that John Gould Fletcher, on a visit to Oxford University, where I was a student, gave me a copy of Soldiers' Pay. I had been out of the South for a long time—in a sense, in flight from the South—and at least half of me was oriented toward Greenwich Village and the Left Bank and not toward the Cumberland Valley in Tennessee; but at the same time I was, I suppose, homesick, and was making my first serious attempt at fiction, fiction with a setting in the part of the South where I had grown up. As a novel, Soldiers' Pay is no better than it should be, but it made a profound and undefinable impression on me. Then came, in the order of my reading, The Sound and the Fury, A I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and These Thirteen.

What happened to me was what happened to almost all the bookreading Southerners I knew. They found dramatized in Faulkner's work some truth about the South and their own...

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1. Introduction
2. Wyndham Lewis
3. Alfred Kazin
4. Clifton Fadiman
5. Michael Millgate
6. Robert Penn Warren
7. Arthur F. Kinney
8. Calvin S. Brown
9. Malcolm Cowley
10. Sean O'Faolain
11. Cleanth Brooks
12. Copyright

1. William Faulkner