Faulkner and Women Writers

Ole Miss Union Room 404

Although Faulkner’s artistic indebtedness to his male literary predecessors has been much discussed and quite well documented, little has been said about ways in which he might have been influenced by women writers whose work he conceivably read during his formative and apprentice years. This paper explores the topic in a general way and goes on to consider specific parallels between the fiction of Faulkner’s early and middle period and that of those women who may have been among his literary ”foremothers," especially selected American novelists who published their major work during the first three decades of this century.