The purpose of this paper is to discuss the early works of William Faulkner and to analyze Faulkner's concern with slavery, poor whites, interracial clashes and sectionalism.
William Faulkner is one of the greatest of American writers. Critically, there is no doubt about that. But his views on certain topics were sure to cause controversy. Witness his views on slavery. Karl (461) discusses Faulkner's views on slavery as expressed in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune. In this interview, Faulkner thinks that "negroes would be better off under slavery, in a benevolent autocracy." He says that the Negroes would be better off because they would have someone to look after them. He doesn't think it would be as good for the white people as for the negroes to have slavery come back. Faulkner says that the negroes are "like children in many of their reactions." When asked about Negro artists, Faulkner responded, "Well, most artists are children, too" (Phillips 19).
This is not a good picture of Faulkner on a subject upon which he wrote so much, and perhaps it is unjustified. Perhaps Faulkner was speaking "tongue in cheek," since he did not at all believe that the artist is like a child. Quite the contrary, he held an exalted view of the artist as a maker and a poet, and his favorite writers were masters of the imagination. we have to conclude that while Faulkner's public statements about race would create outrage, they would not at all coincide with the way he presented race in his fiction. In Light In August, his ongoing project, race enters into the novel as a curse on white as well as black.
Additionally, William Faulkner was an affirmed liberal. He was heavily involved in the integration battle. He became involved with some liberal members of the University of Mississippi faculty to form a moderate group in the face of what was then ('60s) a coming struggle. At this time, Faulkner published an essay cal...