Review by Choice Review
The field of Faulkner studies has a very useful tool in this sensitive reference guide to the author's life and career. Gresset, an influential French critic and translator of Faulkner, has put together a log that chronicles essential biographical data with a timely overview of the Faulkner field. The result is a fascinating juxtaposition of information for a given month or year-Faulkner's relations with publishers, agents, family, and friends, meshed with the writing (e.g., The Sound and the Fury). Gresset's intentions are to give a sense of evolution through a careful selection of the writer's professional activity: inception, composition, revisions, and publication are all given their due, as well as a complete list of stories published during the year. He also claims to bring to light unknown personal aspects of the private life. Judged from a distance, Faulkner's portrait is pathetically revealing: a ``hard-gutted and hard-fisted little man whose rather unhappy life may well have found only in literature ... the deep satisfaction, at once physical and spiritual, that he never ceased to yearn after.'' Appropriate for students (community college through graduate school) and for general readers.-E. Guereschi, St. John's University, N.Y.
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
