Everyone remembers the first William Faulkner short story or novel they read. The rich tapestry of the characters is as memorable as the particularities of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County or that famously short chapter in As I Lay Dying. So it is no surprise that biographies of Faulkner’s life and career would be equally complex. Carl Rollyson’s Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism (University Press of Mississippi 2025) is uniquely compelling in its approach. Rollyson is an authority of biographies and his extensive resume includes biographies of pop-culture icon Marilyn Monroe, artists like Pablo Picasso and Sylvia Plath, and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, as well as two previously published biographies of William Faulkner. In the introduction, Rollyson questions the relevance of literary biography, particular for someone who, like William Faulkner, has been written about extensively. Here, he outlines his method for the reader, stating “So in this book I read Faulkner’s life as a constantly shifting text always open to revision, which is how I think he viewed himself – like the characters in fiction…”
The compilation of essays is divided into four parts: “Faulkner and Biography”; “Faulkner, Politics, and History”; “Faulkner and Hollywood”; and “Faulkner and Race.” Each part examines the subject through a series of stand-alone essays, rich in factual content supported by Faulkner’s letters, interviews, and other biographies. But the author also seamlessly weaves characters, scenes, and plots into the essays, implying that Faulkner’s fiction is not fiction at all, though to suggest that Faulkner was writing into his novels the people and places he encountered or interacted with regularly is overly simple. Rollyson proves this time and again, by deftly illuminating Faulkner’s curation of his own life, his control of how he wanted others to perceive him. In “The Foreigner in Faulkner” Rollyson recounts a time when Faulkner was traveling abroad with the artist William Spalding and appropriated part of Spalding’s adventures as his own. In this way, Faulkner is both the protagonist and a casual observer in the storytelling; his “life” was also a carefully crafted work of fiction. This is reinforced in the essay “Counterpull: Estelle and William Faulkner,” when Ben Wasson, Faulkner’s early literary agent, stated Faulkner “liked to stage a scene.”
This is not to suggest that Faulkner was simply observing people and places and then transcribing them onto the pages of his novels. Faulkner is far too complex a writer and the characters, the scenes, and the morality he fixes onto the page proves it. Rollyson excels at using Faulkner’s own characters and stories to explain the man himself. He tackles the difficult aspects of Faulkner’s life with essays that focus on adultery, politics, and race. In “Faulkner’s Conservatism,” Rollyson exposes the conflict of Faulkner’s personal conservative beliefs and how those beliefs were shaped and molded by his experiences both in Mississippi and abroad. Indeed, Faulkner’s foray into screenwriting and how that influenced him personally and as a writer is perfectly detailed in Rollyson’s essays.
In “Recreating Absalom, Absalom!” Rollyson illustrates the dualities of Faulkner’s writing life and how his nearly two decades in Hollywood impacted him, even though Faulkner voiced disdain for the film industry. Faulkner considered screenwriting its own unique medium, and Rollyson states “what he wrote in a novel or story was fair game for the screen.” It is in this essay that Rollyson best blends Faulkner’s personal narrative and experiences with the characters on the pages of his novels or on the silver screen. He elucidates Faulkner’s conflict with satisfying movie studio bosses and his own narrative arc. In the other essays in Faulkner and Hollywood, Rollyson astutely addresses how Faulkner’s characters in film rarely live up to their fictional counterparts on the page.
Carl Rollyson
And this is why the essays of Rollyson’s collection are so effective at painting a richer, more colorful picture of William Faulkner than typical biographies. In choosing singular topics and aspects of Faulkner’s life, Rollyson delves deeper into them; he mines the novels and short stories for characters and scenes that assist in describing the author’s complex life. He scours interviews and letters that bare Faulkner’s idiosyncratic personality. In The Reivers: On and Off the Screen Rollyson writes, “To confuse Faulkner with his narrator – no matter how many similarities between them can be assembled – is to wreck the fiction…” To return to the introduction of the book, appropriately subtitled “Life as a Text and the Text as Life,” what Rollyson manages across these essays is to prove the interwoven nature of Faulkner with his written word while simultaneously distinguishing between fact and fiction. This is, in many ways, as monumental a feat as Faulkner’s own canon. And while the intended audience for these essays is not the casual reader, Faulkner scholars and readers alike will be fascinated in the collaging together of biography, narrative, opinion, and good old-fashioned storytelling.
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