The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America

Abstract

JAY WATSON University of Mississippi JAIME HARKER University of Mississippi The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah’s Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America ON FRIDAY, JUNE 3, 2005, OPRAH WINFREY MADE A STARTLING announcement: Oprah’s Book Club (OBC), her enormous reading group, had chosen for its summer selection three of William Faulkner’s most critically acclaimed novels. As I Lay Dying was scheduled for June, The Sound and the Fury for July, and Light in August, appropriately, for August. The program amounted to a whole “Summer of Faulkner,” as she billed it. Reactions were swift and for the most part skeptical. The mayor of Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, bookseller Richard Howorth, expressed doubts to The New York Times that Oprah’s readers would last the summer: “With a good reading-group leader, they’ll make it through ‘As I Lay Dying.’. . . But they’re going to start ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and say, ‘What is this?’” Howorth “then feigned throwing a book over his shoulder” (Wyatt). A writer for The Nation saluted Oprah’s seriousness of purpose but still expressed reservations: Faulkner? Oprah? Really? The announcement amounted to nothing less than a sneak attack on the whole idea of beach reading—and on the intelligentsia’s perception of [Winfrey] as the Queen of Midcult. . . . By proposing to read not one but three works by a dead white male whose prose laid siege to the conventions of narrative fiction, and whose furiously lyrical exploration of race and the American South still manages to unsettle readers, Oprah is taking a major gamble on her audience’s attention span and political sensitivities. (Tyree) From the start, then, it was clear that the promise and threat of the Summer of Faulkner lay in the encounter it was staging between an interpretive community consisting of hundreds of thousands of nonacademic readers and a writer alternately celebrated and vilified for his high modernist impenetrability. 356 Watson and Harker I How did Faulkner get here? What brought him to this juncture, at which a twenty-first-century media giant and popular tastemaker could seemingly set out to recover a trio of his modernist masterpieces for a popular reading audience? Was Faulkner’s work even in need of recovery for a general readership? Had he ever really gone away? Or could we understand the Summer of Faulkner instead as a reclamation of Faulkner’s work not so much for as on behalf of a mass audience to whom that work had been more or less continuously presented for seventy-five years, from the moment in September of 1930 when Faulkner, already the author of four published but little-read novels, placed his first short story with The Saturday Evening Post.?1 Evidence for this popular Faulkner, an artist engaged with and available to popular audiences up to and including Oprah’s huge online reading community, abounds if you just look in the right places. And a good place to begin is Faulkner’s career-long, eagerly pursued relationship with the Post, one of the largest-circulating US magazines of his era, where he published twenty stories and novel excerpts during his lifetime. Faulkner scholars like to cite the poor sales figures for his novels during the 1930s and early 1940s, his most fertile creative period, in order to present the writer as a misunderstood, underappreciated modernist genius, ahead of his time in the provincial US South and out of place in middlebrow America. But when Faulkner published in the Post during these same years, his work became available to millions of readers—indeed, tens of millions, if we take account of how “slicks” like thePostactuallycirculatedincontemporaryhouseholds,neighborhoods, offices, and waiting rooms, passed along from reader to reader. Many of Faulkner’s Post stories were crowd-pleasers—“Ambuscade,” “Two Soldiers,” and “Shingles for the Lord” are just a few that come to mind—demonstrating Faulkner’s facility with popular genres and his clear interest in finding, and resonating with, a large audience. He may not have wanted to be a literary celebrity or a public figure, but he indisputably wished to be read, and read widely.2 1 The story was “Thrift,” The Saturday...