WILLIAM FAULKNER’S MOST HERALDED fiction emerged from a phase of creative inspiration and artistic achievement that rivals any in literary history. Remarkably, during a period roughly corresponding to the Great Depression, Faulkner wrote the novels and stories most often read, taught, and examined by scholars. At a time when the American economy produced little, Faulkner produced much. Even though these two significant developments in American history and culture occurred simultaneously, there has been no extensive study of their relationship to each other—until now. In redressing this critical oversight, Faulkner and the Great Depression functions, in the words of Addie...

WILLIAM FAULKNER ENDED the 1920s with the narrative frenzy of The Sound and the Fury and began the thirties, appropriately enough, with As I Lay Dying, the story of a harrowing journey toward an uncertain and ominous horizon. The titles alone suggest connections between these novels and the historical and cultural forces informing their production. On one level, it would seem, Faulkner sensed the last desperate gasp of one era as it succumbed to the reality of a lingering and painful demise. The young nation that had emerged from World War I to assume its role as world power and...

THE RISE IN social consciousness among artists and intellectuals in the 1930s began as a reaction to what had come to be viewed as transgressions in the 1920s—namely the unchecked capitalism of the “robber barons” and a frivolous bourgeoisie and the expatriate impulse that had sent many Americans to the more enriching cultural climes of Europe. With a sort of Lenten devotion, artists and intellectuals repented of their past excesses, publicly renouncing past attitudes and practices driven by bohemian and often hedonistic indulgences. Acknowledging the decadence in life and art so pervasive in the twenties, many in the “lost...

WITH THE ECONOMY in disarray and the social order potentially in jeopardy, Americans in the early years of the Depression understandably entertained visions of strong leadership to restore the nation’s prosperity and purpose. Reading this development ominously, a steady stream of articles and books from some of the nation’s foremost intellectuals reflected on the potential rise of a dictator figure playing on fear itself in order to manipulate a desperate populace and to accomplish the rise of fascism in America. The ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’s provocative novel It Can’t Happen Here (1935), a fictional rendering of authoritarian signs appearing...

THE DAMAGING EFFECTS of the Great Depression hit particularly hard in rural America, home to the small farmer and repository of many ideals that had been formed in the nation’s infancy. At least since Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, the yeoman farmer had remained one of the most enduring figures of strength and independence in the American mythos. But hard times in rural America, extending from the otherwise prosperous twenties through the destitute thirties, altered the symbolic value long attached to this cultural icon. During the Depression, the suffering of small landowners, tenants, and sharecroppers exposed the...

AT THE TIME Faulkner was at work on one of the stories that would eventually become a section of The Unvanquished, he wrote to his agent, “As far as I am concerned, while I have to write trash, I dont care who buys it, as long as they can pay the best price I can get” (Blotner, Selected Letters 84). Once again, apparently, the two-track writing process was at work, for Faulkner wrote this “trash” during intermittent breaks in the composition of a masterpiece, Absalom, Absalom! Initial reception of the two novels favored The Unvanquished, but literary history has turned...