In "The Book of the Grosteques," the first story of his novel Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson introduces the concept of the “grotesque.” This concept sets up the following stories in the novel, and can also be seen in other modernist texts...

William Cuthbert Falkner started his life on September 25, 1897, in Mississippi. He was born into a prominent family, who owned banks and a railroad. Mammy Callie, his childhood nurse, was a major contributor to his works. The stories she would...

“Noah’s children had inherited the flood although they had not been there to see the deluge” (Go Down, Moses 276). This sense of doom follows through five of the major novels written by William Faulkner set in his mythic Yoknapatawpha County. Doom...

As difficult to read as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury proves to be, there are still characteristics to the story that are obvious or obviously out of place. Arguably, just such a characteristic or character would be Mrs. Bland, mother...

In Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury[1], time and the past appear as crucial but complex themes. As a novel constructed around past events which have taken place before the time of narration, the past seems to be very much alive within the...

Born in 1897 in Mississippi, William Faulkner knew black people as servants and laborers, not as equals. Yet, sharing the same space with blacks led him to a deeper understanding of their plight and circumstances. Despite his negative view of...

Regarded as the most prominent writer from the South, William Faulkner spent his entire writing career building stories that both speak of human nature and of the nature of his homeland. In Faulkner’s large volume of work, he goes about exploring...

The suicidal eldest, the special needs middle child, and the youngest, incapable of love: these are the three Compson brothers, each haunted by their own demons and howling for everything they have lost. In his novel The Sound and the Fury,...

Southern aristocratic mothers generally did not take care for their children, and instead, they usually had an “African-American woman [care] for (and essentially raise) Southern white children” (Tucker, 35). Caroline Compson is the neurotic and...

Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple, written in 1982, emerged from the appearance of Feminist writers in the 1970s, when specific gender issues were no longer being suppressed by a patriarchal society. This allowed for the growth of personal freedom...

When the Civil War ended, the Southern countryside and its people were crippled nearly beyond all hope. Of the most dramatic decline, Southern aristocrats took the cake. Before the war, the first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a...

The phenomenon of age has its special place in the literary texts, as the chosen scope mirrors writers’ view of the world, and provokes certain psychological aspects for consideration. For example, romantics preferred a young character, as they...

Regarded as the most prominent writer from the South, William Faulkner spent his entire writing career building stories that both speak of human nature and of the nature of his homeland. In Faulkner’s large volume of work, he goes about exploring...

William Faulkner was born in 1897 in Mississippi to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Faulkner. At a young age, William learned to be self-reliant by fending for himself. This experience in his childhood thus is believed to have significantly...

William Faulkner’s Dry September narrates the forming of a lynch mob in response to an improbable accusation of sexual violence, made by an aging spinster, against a black watchman, Will Mayes, in the small fictional town of Jefferson,...

Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 explores the idea of a person living a tedious, restrictive life while trying to fool himself into believing in a sense of happiness. Similarly, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem, “We Wear the Mask,” proposes the idea...

A comparison between the texts of Hemingway and Faulkner lies in the same fruitless category as comparing apples to oranges. The contrasting elements that set them apart from each other establish two immensely different reading experiences, both...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and William Faulkner’s "Dry September" are very similar to each other structurally and thematically, despite being separated by fifty years and a regional and linguistic barrier. They both use...

Communities normally yield an exclusively physical connection that may not cause any emotional impact. American modernist William Faulkner incisively outlines this situation one of his short stories, in which the protagonist is continuously...

William Faulkner uses his short stories to tell a tale of corruption, especially through the acceptance of white culture, and “A Justice” is no different. He writes his protagonist, Doom, as growing increasingly evil at the same time as his...

In William Faulker's short story "Barn Burning", a struggle erupts when Abner Snopes expects his son, Colonel Sartoris, to ignore his personal moral obligations in order to protect the family honor after a crime is committed. In their small town...