"Absalom, Absalom " has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.

"Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom " offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

"A fully restored American political classic. . . . Now we can read it as it was written." --"Chicago Tribune"
Winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize, "All the King's Men" is one of the most famous and widely read works in American literature, and as relevant today as it was fifty years ago. Now it has been fully restored and reintroduced by literary scholar Noel Polk, textual editor of the works of William Faulkner. Polk presents the novel as it was originally written, revealing even greater energy, excitement, complexity, and subtlety of character in this landmark of letters.
"[Polk] should be commended for this restored edition of Warren's great novel. . . . Deeply imagined, beautifully written, ["All the King's Men"] is both a reckoning with the deepest forces of life and an edge-of-your seat page-turner."--"The Raleigh News and Observer"
"To read ["All the King's Men"] in this new edition is to be struck again by its raw power, its urgency and relevance."--"New Orleans Times-Picayune"
"The publication of a new, corrected edition of "All the King's Men" is welcome news for all who care about American literature." -- Joseph Blotner, author of "Robert Penn Warren: A Biography"
Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989), America's first Poet Laureate, won three Pulitzer Prizes and virtually every other major award given to U.S. writers.
Noel Polk is a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
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Lynching in American Literature and Journalism consists of twelve essays investigating the history and development of writing about lynching as an American tragedy and the ugliest element of national character. According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 European Americans. More than 73 percent of the lynchings in the Civil War period occurred in the Southern states. The Lynchings increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Reconstruction, after slavery had been abolished and free men gained the right to vote. The peak of lynching occurred in 1882, after Southern white Democrats had regained control of the state legislators. This book is a collection of historical and critical discussions of lynching in America that reflects the shameful, unmoral policies, and explores the topic of lynching within American history, literature, and journalism.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury met with only limited success when published in 1929, probably due to its fragmented, non-chronological structure. Since, however, it has become one of the most popular of Faulkner's novels, serving as a litmus paper upon which critical approaches have tested themselves. In the introduction to this volume Noel Polk traces the critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Sound and the Fury from a variety of critical perspectives. Dawn Trouard offers us the women of The Sound and the Fury, reading against the grain of the predominant critical tradition that sees the women through the lens of masculine cultural biases. Donald M. Kartiganer comes to terms with the ways in which the novel simultaneously attracts readers and resists readings. Richard Godden discusses the relationship between incest and miscegenation. Noel Polk examines closely the way Faulkner experiments with language.

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury met with only limited success when published in 1929, probably due to its fragmented, non-chronological structure. Since, however, it has become one of the most popular of Faulkner's novels, serving as a litmus paper upon which critical approaches have tested themselves. In the introduction to this volume Noel Polk traces the critical responses to the novel from the time of its publication to the present day. The essays that follow present contemporary reassessments of The Sound and the Fury from a variety of critical perspectives. Dawn Trouard offers us the women of The Sound and the Fury, reading against the grain of the predominant critical tradition that sees the women through the lens of masculine cultural biases. Donald M. Kartiganer comes to terms with the ways in which the novel simultaneously attracts readers and resists readings. Richard Godden discusses the relationship between incest and miscegenation. Noel Polk examines closely the way Faulkner experiments with language.

Noel Polk, the Faulkner scholar and academician, is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. Like many other southern men he doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. "I almost invariably see myself depicted in the media as either a beer-drinking meanspirited pickup-driving redneck racist, a julep-sipping plantation-owning kindhearted benevolent racist, or, at best, a nonracist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump, good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not because he is intelligent but because he's - well, good hearted." In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past-band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor- Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more American than southern and a tradition that is not mired in the past. As he explores the ways in which his experience of the South defined him, he concludes that his life has been experienced in a parallel universe, not in a time warp. He and many like him exist outside the southern myth. Noel Polk is the author of Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (University Press of Mississippi) and editor of the Reading Faulkner Series and of eleven Faulkner texts for Random House, The Library of America, and Vintage International.

As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking.

His essays in "Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition" maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship.

"Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition" collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis.

Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the "Mississippi Quarterly." From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels. He is the author of "Outside the Southern Myth"; "Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner"; and "Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work."

American Literature -- Literary Criticism

There are three wars in the mind and in the art of William Faulkner--the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Although he did not fight in any war, he postured as a veteran flyer, for he had enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps in Canada. In his novels, short stories, essays, and letters, war remained a looming subject.

"Faulkner and War," a collection of essays from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held at the University of Mississippi in 2001, explores the role that war played in the life and work of a writer whose career seems forever poised against a backdrop of wars going on or recently ended or in the volatile years between. Perhaps most significant for all his works was the Civil War, which had ended thirty-two years before Faulkner was born. Yet it was the vast, escapable panorama against which he set his novels of the anguished South.

John Limon discusses Faulkner's attempt to show how much of the sense of reality that the Great War produced could be rendered in fiction without explicit reference to it, as, for example, in one novel seemingly remote from the war, "As I Lay Dying." Lothar Honnighausen examines Faulkner's evolving ideological attitudes toward war in "Soldiers' Pay," "A Fable," and "The Mansion."

These and other essays give illumination to Faulkner's close analysis of war and its consequences as they appear in his work.

Noel Polk, a professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi, is the author of "Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner," "Eudora Welty: A Critical Bibliography," "Outside the Southern Myth" (all from University Press of Mississippi), and other books.

Ann J. Abadie, co-editor of publications in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

Mississippi's Piney Woods: A Human Perspective edited by Noel Polk with essays by Harold K. Steen, John H. Napier III, Terry G. Jordan, Grady McWhiney, Thomas D. Clark, Nollie W. Hickman, James C. Downey, W. Kenneth Holditch, Thomas L. McHaney, William F. Winter, Warren A. Flick, Milton B. Newton, Jr., Sidney McDaniel, and Noel Polk. For years the Mississippi Piney Woods region has gone virtually untouched by historians, though J. F. H. Claiborne and James Street have made wonderful use of its colorful and significant past. Only Nollie Hickman's Mississippi Harvest has attempted to examine in full any aspect of the area's history and culture in his study focusing on the area's important lumber industry. This book, Mississippi's Piney Woods: A Human Perspective, the papers from the first Crosby Memorial Lecture Series at the University of Southern Mississippi, is a groundbreaking volume in Mississippi studies in that it is an attempt to open the Piney Woods to historical and cultural scrutiny, and it is one of the first volumes on the subject of Mississippi history to approach any area of the state from so many diverse but complementary scholarly disciplines. Among the topics explored by first-rate scholars are the area's geography, its pioneer settlers' roots in Europe, its lumber industry, its politics, its music, its economics, and its literature. As a whole, the volume demonstrates the ways in which each of these topics and approaches intersects with and impinges upon the others, and thus suggests the ways in which the life of any region is determined not by any single force, even when that force is in some ways overwhelming, but by a complex and subtle intermingling of a variety of vital forces which exert pressures on the life of the individual from many different sources. This volume undertakes to explore these diverse forces, and thus to show how they converge and interact to shape the lives of human beings in any age and region. Noel Polk is Professor Emeritus of English at Mississippi State University and the editor of The Mississippi Quarterly.

"Absalom, Absalom " has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him." On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.

"Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom " offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

This informative study representing a variety of scholarly perspectives reveals the cultural, historical, economic, political, and even geographical evolution of Old Natchez, which until now has been given little attention.

In some ways, Natchez is among the best-known of American towns. Because of its strategic location high atop the Mississippi River bluffs, it became, in the early years of this country's development, the cultural and economic matrix for the great American Southwest. However, despite its rich history and strong hold on the American imagination, there are many areas of Natchez history that remain relatively unexplored.

In these papers from the second L.O. Crosby, Jr., Memorial Lectures, scholars from a variety of academic disciplines suggest numerous ways in which forces converged on the people of the Natchez area to shape and mold their daily lives.

Ian Brown portrays Indian lifeways in the Natchez region in historic times by drawing on archaeological expeditions and on the writings and sketches of travelers such as Le Page du Pratz and Alexandre De Batz. Letha Wood Audhuy contributes to an understanding of Natchez's significance in Western culture by exploring the writings of Chateaubriand. Using the Spanish archives, Alfred E. Lemmon reconstructs Natchez under Spanish Dons. Don E. Carleton surveys the enormous dimensions of the Natchez Trace Collection, a Collection of original manuscripts, financial and legal records, sheet music, photographs and other archival documents which span the years between the late 1770s and the early 1900s. Analyzing the Wilton map of 1774, Milton B. Newton, Jr., demonstrates precisely how it documents the arrival of tangible British order in the Old Natchez District. Morton Rothstein describes the beginnings of the Natchez economy. Estill Curtis Pennington examines important surviving artifacts of the Natchezians' material culture to show how they brought the culture and refinement of the East to frontier society. Jeanne Middleton Forsythe tells of the values and beliefs of Old Natchez as they are reflected in the educational enterprises of the pre-1830s. Finally, Samuel Wilson, Jr., establishes the architectural distinctiveness of some of the older Natchez buildings in the context of the history of the time and place.

This volume guides readers through one of William Faulkner's most complex novels. By common consent The Sound and the Fury is a seminal document of twentieth-century literature. Almost from the beginning, it has been a litmus test for critical approaches--from New Criticism to biography and manuscript analysis. In the past two decades, nearly all of the newest critical theories have come calling on Faulkner's novel. Yet it resists or evades even the most ardent theorists' efforts to contain it, and much of its total accomplishment remains unplumbed. This volume, like others in the Reading Faulkner Series, provides line-by-line interpretation and concentration on individual words and sentences, visual dimensions, time shifts, intricacies of narration, and other obscurities. It explores Faulkner's words as they appear on the page, deciphering and responding to them in their linear progression and in their cumulating resonances inside and outside the text. Important allusions and references are identified, as are dates and historical passages. For many passages alternative readings are offered. The pagination is keyed to the definitive text of the Vintage edition.

Like many other southern men Noel Polk doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. This notable Faulkner critic is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past - band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor - Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more "American" than "Southern" and a tradition that is not mired in the past.