Noel Polk

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEThe classic, ever-relevant story of a backcountry lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power -- American literature's definitive political novel.All the King's Men traces the rise of fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional Southern policitian who resembles the real-life Huey Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his career as an idealistic man of the people, but he soon becomes corrupted by success and the lust for power.

The poems in the first part of this book are set in and/or inspired by my walking safari in the South Luangwa Valley of Zambia in the summer of 2010. Some of the poems are whimsical responses to the guidebook, others taking serious the Mississippi-Africa axis in race relations. The title poem is a long meditation on that axis. Two poems are set in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia, where friends took us to an AIDS compound (read: Ghetto) and another to an AIDS hospital. The “other poems” are poems I wrote many years ago and others that I started but recently finished; others are new poems, mostly set in and around my life in Mississippi.—Noel Polk

As one of the preeminent scholars of southern literature, Noel Polk has delivered lectures, written journal articles and essays, and discussed the rich legacy of the South's literary heritage around the world for over three decades. His work on William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and other writers is incisive and groundbreaking. His essays in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition maintain an abiding interest in Polk's major area of literary study: the relationship between the smaller units of construction in a literary work and the work's larger themes. The analysis of this interplay between commas and dashes, curious occlusions, passages, and characters who have often gone unnoticed in the critical discourse--the bricks and mortar, as it were--and a work's grand design is a crucial aspect of Polk's scholarship. Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition collects Polk's essays from the late-1970s to 2005. Featuring an introduction that places Faulkner and Welty at the center of the South's literary heritage, the volume asks useful, probing questions about southern literature and provides insightful analysis. Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly. From 1981 to 2006, he edited the Library of America's complete edition of William Faulkner's novels. He is the author of Outside the Southern Myth; Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner; and Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work.

Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, ""who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."" On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Absalom, Absalom! has long been regarded as one of William Faulkner's most difficult, dense, and multilayered novels. It is, on one level, the story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, ""who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."" On another level, the book narrates the tragedy that befalls the entire Sutpen family and that tragedy's legacy that continues well into the twentieth century and beyond. The novel's intricate, demanding prose style, and its haunting dramatization of the South's intricate, demanding history make it a masterpiece of twentieth-century American literature.Reading Faulkner: Absalom, Absalom! offers a close examination and interpretation of the novel. Here difficult words and cultural terms that might prove to be a problem for general readers are explained and keyed to page numbers in the definitive Faulkner text (Library of America and Vintage editions). The authors place Faulkner's novel in its historical context, while also connecting it to his other works.

Eudora Welty (1909-2001) and William Faulkner (1897-1962) were almost unquestionably Mississippi's leading literary lions during the twentieth century. Their influence on American literature is immeasurable. On William Faulkner brings together Welty's reviews, essays, lectures, and musings on Faulkner, including such gems as her reviews of Intruder in the Dust and The Selected Letters of William Faulkner, as well as her comments during her presentation of the Gold Medal to Faulkner during the National Institute of Arts and Letters awards ceremony in 1962. The collection also features an excerpt from a letter she wrote to the novelist Jean Stafford, telling of meeting Faulkner and of going sailing with him. Included too are Welty's impassioned defense of Faulkner's work-published as a letter to the New Yorker-and the obituary of the Nobel laureate that she wrote for the Associated Press. In addition, the book includes a cryptic postcard Faulkner wrote to Welty from Hollywood, plus six photographs, and a caricature of Faulkner drawn by Welty during the 1930s. Commenting on the place of both writers in contemporary literature, an essay by the noted literary scholar Noel Polk puts the collection in context and offers assessment and appreciation of their achievements in American literature. On William Faulkner is a valuable resource for exploring Faulkner's work and sensing Welty's critical voice. Her sharp critical eye and graceful prose make her an astute commentator on his legacy. William Faulkner is the author of The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, among others. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

This book by a major scholar of William Faulkner's writings collects choice selections of his Faulkner criticism from the past fifteen years. Its publication underscores the significance of his indispensable work in Faulkner studies, both in criticism and in the editing of Faulkner's texts. Here, Polk's focus is mainly upon the context of Freudian themes, expressly in the works written between 1927 and 1932, the period in which Faulkner wrote and ultimately revised Sanctuary, a novel to which Polk has given concentrated study during his distinguished career. He has connected the literature with the life in a way not achieved in previous criticism. Although other critics, notably John T. Irwin and Andre Bleikasten have explored Oedipal themes, neither perceived them as operating so completely at the center of Faulkner's work as Polk does in these essays.

Noel Polk, the Faulkner scholar and academician, is a native of the small Mississippi city of Picayune. In his career as an international scholar and traveler and in his role as a teacher and a professor of literature he has moved beyond his origins while continuing to be nourished by his hometown roots. Like many other southern men he doesn't fit the outside world's stereotype of the southern male. ""I almost invariably see myself depicted in the media as either a beer-drinking meanspirited pickup-driving redneck racist, a julep-sipping plantation-owning kindhearted benevolent racist, or, at best, a nonracist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump, good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not because he is intelligent but because he's - well, good hearted."" In Outside the Southern Myth Polk offers an apologia for a huge segment of southern males and communities that don't belong in the media portraits. His town was not antebellum. There were no plantations. No Civil War battles were fought there. It had little racial divisiveness. It was one of the thousands that mushroomed along the railroads as a response to logging and milling industries. It was mainly middle-class, not reactionary or exclusive. While evoking both the pleasures and the problems of his past-band trips, a yearning for cityscapes, religious conversion, awakening to the realities of fundamentalist fervor- Polk offers himself, his family, and his town to exemplify an aspect that is more American than southern and a tradition that is not mired in the past. As he explores the ways in which his experience of the South defined him, he concludes that his life has been experienced in a parallel universe, not in a time warp. He and many like him exist outside the southern myth. Noel Polk is the author of Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (University Press of Mississippi) and editor of the Reading Faulkner Series and of eleven Faulkner texts for Random House, The Library of America, and Vintage International.

This volume guides readers through one of William Faulkner's most complex novels. By common consent The Sound and the Fury is a seminal document of twentieth-century literature. Almost from the beginning, it has been a litmus test for critical approaches--from New Criticism to biography and manuscript analysis. In the past two decades, nearly all of the newest critical theories have come calling on Faulkner's novel. Yet it resists or evades even the most ardent theorists' efforts to contain it, and much of its total accomplishment remains unplumbed. This volume, like others in the Reading Faulkner Series, provides line-by-line interpretation and concentration on individual words and sentences, visual dimensions, time shifts, intricacies of narration, and other obscurities. It explores Faulkner's words as they appear on the page, deciphering and responding to them in their linear progression and in their cumulating resonances inside and outside the text. Important allusions and references are identified, as are dates and historical passages. For many passages alternative readings are offered. The pagination is keyed to the definitive text of the Vintage edition.