Additional information
by Joseph R. Urgo (Editor), Ann J. Abadie (Editor)
Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald
William Faulkner once said that the writer "collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box." Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as "not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time." His Christian background, according to him, was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to "the lumber room" that would help him tell a story.
Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas Mann--writers he would elsewhere declare as "the two great men in my time." Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction, when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: "I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't."
Nevertheless, Faulkner's life was rich in what he did, saw, and read, and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature.
Joseph R. Urgo is dean of the faculty at Hamilton College. Ann J. Abadie is associate director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
Author Biography
Joseph R. Urgo (Editor)
Joseph R. Urgo is chair of the English Department at the University of Mississippi. His books include Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom!; Faulkner's Apocrypha; Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture; and In the Age of Distraction, among others, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
Ann J. Abadie (1939-2024) was associate director emerita of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi as well as coeditor of numerous scholarly collections from the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference and other books published by University Press of Mississippi.
