Arguably the greatest novelist yet to emerge from the United States, William Faulkner was a white Southerner creatively obsessed with problems of personal identity, social change, religion, sexuality, race, and that elaborate circuitry of passion and power - the family.In this major reassessment, now available in paperback, Richard Gray uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a brilliantly detailed portrait of the place and times Faulkner inhabited and to reveal just how intimately woven together were the tangled threads of Faulkner’s personal and public experience - the privacy that Faulkner cherished and this history in which, whether he liked it or not, he was ensnared.