Legacy: The Artists Behind The Legends

William Cuthbert Faulkner was a Mississippi-born novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, poet, essayist, and playwright, as well as the winner of both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes. His work came at an extremely polarizing time in United States history, living through two world wars and the Great Depression, and this was additionally a time when the Southern states remained extremely segregated…and extremely racist. Faulkner himself was a proud Southerner, yet his work reflects a profound understanding of race relations in the 1920s-1950s throughout the South, and goes so far as to make the point that racism is poisoning the southern United States – remember, this is during the Jim Crow years, the rise of the KKK, and Faulkner was revolutionary in that he threw the spotlight on the South’s inability to move on from Civil War times and their horrible treatment of the black community. When I began researching Faulkner I was a little terrified in that I was not aware of his personal politics. The more I lear