William Faulkner

From the beginning, William Faulkner's art was consciously self-presenting. In writing of all kinds he created and performed a complex set of roles based in his life as he both lived and imagined it. In his fiction, he counterpoised those personae against one another to create a written world of controlled chaos, made in his own protean image and reflective of his own multiple sense of self. In this text, Watson draws on the entire Faulkner canon, including letters and photographs, to decipher the ways in which Faulkner put himself forward through written performances and displays based in, and expressive of, his biography.