One Matchless Time

Few American novelists loom as large as William Faulkner, and Jay Parini sets out to find the person behind the legend. Drawing on letters and memoirs that had not been available before, along with conversations with Faulkner's daughter and with the women he loved, Parini portrays an obsessive artist who struggled with alcoholism and an unhappy marriage yet still rose above those limits.

Rather than separating the man from his books, Parini interweaves the hardships and high points of Faulkner's life with the novels they produced. The story moves with the pace of fiction while still offering close, analytical attention to the work. Readers see how the history, people, and soil of Oxford, Mississippi, supplied the raw material for Yoknapatawpha County and the characters who populate it.

At its heart is the question of what it cost Faulkner to make his art, and how he turned personal suffering into lasting American literature. The book aims to move past the myth that has grown up around him and to explore the complicated man who invented that fictional county.

Parini is himself a poet and novelist, a background that informs his attention to the craft of Faulkner's writing.