The Bear William Faulkner | William Van O'Connor (essay date 1953)
William Van O'Connor (essay date 1953)
SOURCE: "The Wilderness Theme in Faulkner's The Bear'," in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, edited by Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1960, pp. 322-30.
[In the essay below, which originally appeared in the periodical Accent in 1953, O'Connor analyzes the wilderness theme of "The Bear" in relation to the theme of racial injustice, and notes differences between the original and revised versions of the story.]
Inevitably, as Faulkner has grown older, the problems of his region have become more and more profoundly intertwined with his own commitments and ideals. To a reporter who interviewed her about Faulkner at the time of the Nobel Award, Mrs. Calvin Brown, who had known Faulkner since he was a boy, said, "I think Billy is heartbroken about what he sees, heartbroken about the deterioration of ideals." She felt he has also suffered, as all...
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