K. Ratliff in
The Hamlet (1940) was there a character who came close to representing Faulkner's point of view. Faulkner's fiction comes very near to being a pure example of the storytelling art that focuses on characters—"flesh-and-blood, living, suffering, anguishing human beings"-rather than the subjective author-as-narrator mode of other important modernists such as Ernest Hemingway.
We recognize Faulkner's art less for its geographical accuracy than for its human accuracy. That he lived and wrote in the South has relatively little to do with his technical prowess or many of his thematic concerns. Widely read, reasonably well-traveled, Faulkner lived and wrote in Mississippi because living there was relatively inexpensive, because his and his wife's families were there, and because he liked both the rural simplicity and the comparative freedom to live as he wanted. To label him a "Southern writer" with any sense of denigration or limitation is surely inaccurate. Critical opinion once took that tack, but since Malcolm Cowley edited The Portable Faulkner in 1946 and prefaced it with his perspicacious critical assessment, the level of published criticism has improved greatly. There now is more work published on Faulkner than on any other American author, proving that Faulkner's fiction continues to speak to contemporary readers.
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