The Saddest Words
by Michael Gorra, Joe Barrett
How do we read William Faulkner in the twenty-first century? asks Michael Gorra, one of America's most preeminent literary critics. Should we still read William Faulkner in this new century? What can his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the Civil War, that central quarrel in our nation's history? These are the provocative questions that Michael Gorra asks in this historic portrait of the novelist and his world. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of Lost Cause romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualizes Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.
Compact Disc
English
Brand New
Author Biography
Joe Barrett began his acting career at the age of five in the basement of his family's home in upstate New York. He has gone on to play many stage roles, both on and off-Broadway, and in regional theaters from Los Angeles, Houston, and St. Louis to Washington DC, San Francisco, and Portland, Maine. He has appeared in films and television, both prime time and late night, and in hundreds of television and radio commercials. Joe has narrated over two hundred audiobooks. He has been an Audie Award finalist eight times, and his narration of Gun Church by Reed Farrel Coleman won the 2013 Audie Award for Original Work. AudioFile magazine has granted Joe fourteen Earphones Awards, including for James Salter's All That Is and Donald Katz's Home Fires. Regarding Joe's narration of John Irving's A Prayer For Owen Meany, AudioFile said, This moving book comes across like a concerto . . . with a soloist-Owen's voice-rising from the background of an orchestral narration. Joe is married to actor Andrea Wright, and together they have four very grown children. The author of Portrait of Novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Michael Gorra is the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and the editor of the Norton Critical Editions of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury.
Review
"The Saddest Words, [is] an entry point into one of the secret themes of Faulkner's oeuvre: the Civil War, and the collective madness that underlay the Southern resistance to abolition."-- "New Republic"
"Gorra's complex and thought-provoking meditation on Faulkner is rich in insight, making the case for the novelist's literary achievement and his historical value--as an unparalleled chronicler of slavery's aftermath and its damage to America's psyche."-- "New York Times Book Review"
"In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book...setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic. But he also writes, he confesses, as an 'act of citizenship.'"-- "The Atlantic"
Review Quote
"The Saddest Words, [is] an entry point into one of the secret themes of Faulkner's oeuvre: the Civil War, and the collective madness that underlay the Southern resistance to abolition."
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