Joseph blotner faulkner a biography

At nearly pages, this is everything and the kitchen sink biography. Blotner's life starts a couple of generations back and stops with Faulkner's funeral, at which he was one of the pallbearers. That fact ought to indicate both some of the virtues as well as the defects of the work. Blotner met Faulkner when he came to be an author in residence at Virginia, where Blotner was then a junior member of the English department. Blotner and his wife came to be close personal friends of the Faulkners over a period of some five or so years. It seems that Blotner was given privileged access in some ways to this most private of authors. The biography that results is unparalleled in some of its fine-grained details. Indeed, it's a little too fine-grained, frankly, getting into some incredible minutiae at times. And there are the occasional anecdotes repeated in widely separated chapters. Blotner seemed too wary, however, for Faulkner's reputation in some ways. While he doesn't wink at the drinking and is especially even-handed with Faulkner's evolving thoughts on race issues, Blotner goes out of his way to paint a gentlemanly gloss on Faulkner's numerous and, in some cases, longstanding, extramarital affairs, which is to say, he almost completely ignores them.

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