William Faulkner Day by Day Available to Purchase

For a writer who fiercely guarded his privacy, especially after receiving the Nobel Prize in 1950 and becoming a literary celebrity, who professed a desire that “the printed books” be his only imprint on history, and who once proposed as his “obit and epitaph both” a single line—“He made the books and he died”—William Faulkner (1897–1962) left a massive documentary trail for posterity, one that has proven irresistible to biographers: literary, critical, psychoanalytic, feminist, popular, authorized, unauthorized, over a dozen in all since Joseph Blotner inaugurated the genre in 1974. Most recent among that cohort is Carl Rollyson, whose two-volume Life of William Faulkner was published in 2020. In William Faulkner Day by Day, however, Rollyson proposes a different kind of biographical undertaking. His wager is that, by stripping away the interpretive and narrative scaffolding that is ordinarily the biographer’s stock in trade and leaving only the bare facts...