This is a reassessment which uses and develops recent theories about the relationship between writing and historical experience, language and social change, to draw a detailed portrait of the place and times William Faulkner inhabited.

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, region, sexuality, race, and that elaborate circuitry of passion and power, the family.