This book is about the making of the writer William Faulkner. It is the first to inquire into the three most important women in his lifehis black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and the childhood friend who became his wife, Estelle Oldham. In this new exploration of Faulkners creative process, Judith L. Sensibar discovers that these womens relationships with Faulkner were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. Sensibar brings to the foregroundas Faulkner didthis female world, an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography.
Through extensive research in untapped biographical sourcesarchival materials and interviews with these women's families and other members of the communities in which they livedSensibar transcends existing scholarship and reconnects Faulkners biography to his work. She demonstrates how the themes of race, tormented love, and addiction that permeated his fiction had their origins in his three defining relationships with women. Sensibar alters and enriches our understanding not only of Faulkner, his art, and the complex world of the American South that came to life in his brilliant fiction but also of darknesses, fears, and unspokens that Faulkner unveiled in the American psyche.
