Pylon
by FAULKNER, William
- Used
- Very Good
- Hardcover
- Signed
- Condition
- Very Good
- Seller
-
Gloucester City, New Jersey, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
Cowley was a poet and literary critic, and chronicler of the so-called "Lost Generation" of American expatriates in Paris. While probably best known for his book of poetry *Blue Juniata*, his most important work was his editing of the Viking Portable Library, where his selections and criticisms fostered the popularization of those American authors whose reputations and fortunes had suffered between the Wars. William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, both of whom had to some degree disappeared from the landscape of the American literary conversation, enjoyed critical resurgences as the result of the Portable editions.
Cowley's 1944 Portable Hemingway sold so well that he was able to convince Viking to publish a Portable Faulkner in 1946. William Faulkner was, at the time, slipping into literary obscurity. By the 1930s, he was working as a Hollywood screenwriter and in danger of seeing his works go out of print. Cowley argued for a dramatic revaluation of Faulkner's position in American letters, enlisting him as an honorary member of the Lost Generation.
Robert Penn Warren called *The Portable Faulkner* the "great watershed" moment for Faulkner's reputation, and many scholars view Cowley's essay as having resuscitated Faulkner's career. Faulkner won a Nobel Prize in 1949. He later said, "I owe Malcolm Cowley the kind of debt no man could ever repay." A significant association copy.
Synopsis
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. His family was rooted in local history: his great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel and state politician, was assassinated by a former partner in 1889, and his grandfather was a wealth lawyer who owned a railroad. When Faulkner was five his parents moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he received a desultory education in local schools, dropping out of high school in 1915. Rejected for pilot training in the U.S. Army, he passed himself off as British and joined the Canadian Royal Air Force in 1918, but the war ended before he saw any service. After the war, he took some classes at the University of Mississippi and worked for a time at the university post office. Mostly, however, he educated himself by reading promiscuously. Faulkner had begun writing poems when he was a schoolboy, and in 1924 he published a poetry collection, The Marble Faun , at his own expense. His literary aspirations were fueled by his close friendship with Sherwood Anderson, whom he met during a stay in New Orleans. Faulkner's first novel, Soldier’s Pay , was published in 1926, followed a year later by Mosquitoes , a literary satire. His next book, Flags in the Dust , was heavily cut and rearranged at the publisher’s insistence and appeared finally as Sartoris in 1929. In the meantime he had completed The Sound and the Fury , and when it appeared at the end of 1929 he had finished Sanctuary and was ready to begin writing As I Lay Dying . That same year he married Estelle Oldham, whom he had courted a decade earlier. Although Faulkner gained literary acclaim from these and subsequent novels— Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942)—and continued to publish stories regularly in magazines, he was unable to support himself solely by writing fiction. he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, and Warner Brothers, forming a close relationship with director Howard Hawks, with whom he worked on To Have and Have Not , The Big Sleep , and Land of the Pharaohs , among other films. In 1944 all but one of Faulkner's novels were out of print, and his personal life was at low ebb due in part to his chronic heavy drinking. During the war he had been discovered by Sartre and Camus and others in the French literary world. In the postwar period his reputation rebounded, as Malcolm Cowley's anthology The Portable Faulkner brought him fresh attention in America, and the immense esteem in which he was held in Europe consolidated his worldwide stature. Faulkner wrote seventeen books set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, home of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury . “No land in all fiction lives more vividly in its physical presence than this county of Faulkner’s imagination,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in an essay on Cowley’s anthology. “The descendants of the old families, the descendants of bushwhackers and carpetbaggers, the swamp rats, the Negro cooks and farm hands, the bootleggers and gangsters, tenant farmers, college boys, county-seat lawyers, country storekeepers, peddlers—all are here in their fullness of life and their complicated interrelations.” In 1950, Faulkner traveled to Sweden to accept the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. In later books— Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962)—he continued to explore what he had called “the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself,” but did so in the context of Yoknapatawpha’s increasing connection with the modern world. He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.
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Details
- Bookseller
- Between the Covers- Rare Books, Inc. ABAA (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 469253
- Title
- Pylon
- Author
- FAULKNER, William
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Very Good
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Publisher
- Harrison Smith and Robert Haas
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1935
- Keywords
- BooksIntoFilm, NobelLaureate, SouthernAuthor/Interest, AmerLit20thCent, AssociationCopy
Terms of Sale
Between the Covers- Rare Books, Inc. ABAA
All books are first editions unless otherwise noted. All books are returnable within ten days if returned in the same condition as sent. We accept VISA, MASTERCARD, AMERICAN EXPRESS, DISCOVER, PAYPAL, checks and money orders. New Jersey residents please add 6.625% sales tax. All items guaranteed, all items subject to prior sale. Members ABAA, ILAB. Shipping is $4.50 for Media Mail, $10.00 for Priority Mail or UPS Ground. Tracking is provided for every order. Alternate shipping available by request. Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or oversized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required.
About the Seller
Between the Covers- Rare Books, Inc. ABAA
About Between the Covers- Rare Books, Inc. ABAA
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Inscribed
- When a book is described as being inscribed, it indicates that a short note written by the author or a previous owner has been...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...
- Association Copy
- An association copy is a copy of a book which has been signed and inscribed by the author for a personal friend, colleague, or...
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...