> Faulkner ought to be a giant among Americans. When I first came to this
> country in the sixties of the last century, as a foreigner I did not
> very much like anything about it. But when I started to read Faulkner's
> impassioned stories about the South I became curious. What had happened
> here? And that's when I fell in love with America, a love that is very
> sorely tested right now.
To make the story more complete (and possibly richer?), he was of course a cad.
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=20&fulltext=1&media=
> JOAN WILLIAMS SAID IT BEST herself when confronted with William Faulkner's curious and cutting response to a book-jacket-blurb request from her editor. "It was obviously," she said, "a very petulant kind of thing. Why couldn't he have just given me a nice quotation?"
[...]
> Faulkner blamed Williams's marriage on her middle-class background. His haranguing, evident in some of his earliest letters, quickly became thematic. He wrote her often that she wasn't "demon-driven enough" for art and that her sexual inhibitions would keep her from developing her true talents. He chided her for running from herself and running from him. She must stop being afraid, stop running and accept the heat, fire, and sweat of the real world, the world of the artist. The anger in these letters Williams attributed to her "refusals of him."
[...]