William Faulkner is considered by many readers to have been America's greatest modern writer. His fiction satisfies the critical demands that writing be inventive and invigorating, as ready to release the imagination as it is to channel it. Each of Faulkner's novels is a distinct structure of language, carefully shaped to achieve its own distinct meaning. Faulkner faces the problematic existence of the modern world, and he insists that human beings can surmount those problems. As he said in his Nobel Prize address, "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." Faulkner portrays in his fiction all the qualities he finds necessary for truly human and humane existencehonor, respect, love, bravery, loyalty, humor, responsibility, reverence, fear. The vividness of his characterizations places him with such writers as Shakespeare, Dostoyevski, and Dickens; his moral point of view places him with these and other less likely compatriots—Milton, for one, and perhaps Dante.
