During more than two decades (1932-1954), William Faulkner worked on approximately fifty screenplays for studios, including MGM, 20th Century-Fox, and Warner Bros., and was credited on such classic films as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. The scripts that Faulkner wrote for film--and, later on, television--constitute an extensive and, until now, thoroughly underexplored archival source. Stefan Solomon not only analyzes the majority of these scripts but compares them to the novels and short stories Faulkner was writing at the same time. Solomon's aim is to reconcile two aspects of a career that were not as distinct as they first might seem: Faulkner as a screenwriter and Faulkner as a high modernist, Nobel Prize-winning author. Faulkner's Hollywood sojourns took place during a period roughly bounded by the publication of Light in August (1932) and A Fable (1954) and that also saw the publication of Absalom, Absalom!; Go Down, Moses; and Intruder in the Dust. As Solomon shows Faulkner attuning himself to the idiosyncrasies of the screen-writing process (a craft he never favored or admired), he offers insights into Faulkner's compositional practice, thematic preoccupations, and understanding of both classic cinema and the emerging medium of television. In the midst of this complex exchange of media and genres, much of Faulkner's fiction of the 1930s and 1940s was directly influenced by his protracted engagement with the film industry. Solomon helps us to see a corpus integrating two vastly different modes of writing and a restless author, sensitive to the different demands of each. Faulkner was never simply the southern novelist or the West Coast "hack writer" but always both at once. Solomon's study shows that Faulkner's screenplays are crucial in any consideration of his far more esteemed fiction--and that the two forms of writing are more porous and intertwined than the author himself would have us believe. Here is a major American writer seen in a remarkably new way.

A scholarly examination of the scripts and fiction Faulkner created during his foray as a Hollywood screenwriter. During more than two decades (1932-1954), William Faulkner worked on approximately fifty screenplays for major Hollywood studios and was credited on such classics as The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not. Faulkner’s film scripts—and later television scripts—constitute an extensive and, until now, thoroughly underexplored archival source. Stefan Solomon analyzes the majority of these scripts and also compares them to the fiction Faulkner was writing concurrently. His aim: to reconcile two aspects of a career that were not as distinct as they first might seem: Faulkner the screenwriter and Faulkner the modernist, Nobel Prize–winning author. As Solomon shows Faulkner adjusting to the idiosyncrasies of the screen­writing process (a craft he never favored or admired), he offers insights into Faulkner’s compositional practice, thematic preoccupations, and understanding of both cinema and television. In the midst of this complex exchange of media and genres, much of Faulkner’s fiction of the 1930s and 1940s was directly influenced by his protracted engagement with the film industry. Solomon helps us to see a corpus integrating two vastly different modes of writing and a restless author. Faulkner was never only the southern novelist or the West Coast “hack writer” but always both at once. Solomon’s study shows that Faulkner’s screenplays are crucial in any consideration of his far more esteemed fiction—and that the two forms of writing are more porous and intertwined than the author himself would have us believe. Here is a major American writer seen in a remarkably new way.

“You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore.” —William Faulkner These short works offer three different approaches to Faulkner, each representative of his work as a whole. Spotted Horses is a hilarious account of a horse auction, and pits the “cold practicality” of women against the boyish folly of men. Old Man is something of an adventure story. When a flood ravages the countryside of the lower Mississippi, a convict finds himself adrift with a pregnant woman. And The Bear, perhaps his best known shorter work, is the story of a boy’s coming to terms wit the adult world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride, humility, and courage.

Tracing the influence of Faulkner’s screenwriting on his literary craft and depictions of women William Faulkner’s time as a Hollywood screenwriter has often been dismissed as little more than an intriguing interlude in the career of one of America’s greatest novelists. Consequently, it has not received the wide-ranging critical examination it deserves. In Faulkner’s Hollywood Novels, Ben Robbins provides an overdue thematic analysis by systematically tracing a dialogue of influence between Faulkner’s literary fiction and screenwriting over a period of two decades. Among numerous insights, Robbins’s work sheds valuable new light on Faulkner’s treatment of female characters, both in his novels and in the films to which he contributed. Drawing on extensive archival research, Robbins finds that Hollywood genre conventions and archetypes significantly influenced and reshaped Faulkner’s craft after his involvement in the studio system. His work in the film industry also produced a deep exploration of the gendered dynamics of collaborative labor, genre formulae, and cultural hierarchies that materialized in both his Hollywood screenplays and his experimental fiction.

A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man.

"Lurie takes particular interest in the influence of cinema on Faulkner's fiction and the visual strategies he both deployed and critiqued. These include the suggestion of cinematic viewing on the part of readers and of characters in each of the novels; the collective and individual acts of voyeurism in Sanctuary and Light in August; the exposing in Absalom! Absalom! and Light in August of stereotypical and cinematic patterns of thought about history and race; and the evocation of popular forms like melodrama and the movie screen in If I forget thee, Jerusalem. Offering innovative readings of these canonical works, this study sheds new light on Faulkner's uniquely American modernism."--BOOK JACKET.