Author Study: William Faulkner

Sold out - contact Lillian Dabney to join the waitlist. 

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."  -  William Faulkner.

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum invites you to explore the well known novels of one of America's most remarkable and perplexing writers, William Faulkner. The gruop will meet on the fourth Wednesday of each month, with November and December dates to be discussed. View the full schedule  and order books in this series on Folio's Bookshop.

Many of Faulkner's novels are set in the fictional town of Yoknapatawpha County that is based on his hometown of Oxford in Lafayette County Mississippi. In his novels Faulkner explores how people process the past; what they stubbornly hold onto, unwittingly forget, and willingly distort. He contemplates the unreliable nature of history and memory, and uses confusion intentionally to encourage us to investigate the mysterious parts of the mind and listen to the hidden meanings of life.His works are rarely easy to read, yet deeply rewarding.

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in 1897 and raised in Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. One of the towering figures of American literature, he is the author of The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and As I Lay Dying, among many other remarkable book. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1950 and France's Legion of Honor in 1951. A Fable won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer in 1955  and his final book The Reivers received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1962. He died in 1962.

"No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word than did William Faulkner. If you want to know all you can about the heart and soul, the fiction where he put it is still right there." - Eudora Welty

Schedule: 

• The Sound and the Fury (1929) - September 25, 2024
• As I Lay Dying (1930) - October 23, 2024
• Light in August (1932) - November 20, 2024 - to be discussed
• Absalom, Absalom (1936) -  December 26, 2024
• The Wild Psalms (1939) - January 22, 2025
• Go Down Moses (1942) - February 26, 2025
• Intruder in the Dust (1948) -  March 26, 2025
• A Fable (1954)  -  April 30, 2025
• The Reivers (1962) - May