![]() ![]() ![]() “The Great American Civil War Novel” of the 20th Century is undoubtedly Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in which the story of a family’s Civil War suffering is told three times, from three unreliable perspectives. Enslaved boys riding in wagons with their white fathers, and mixed race half-brothers in Confederate grey raised themes of slavery and sexuality that too many historians of their day were afraid to bring to the surface. The two great Southern writers gave visceral accounts of the war in stories told by grandsons or discovered in informal family archives by descendants trying to untangle racially mixed genealogies. Long before the modern field of Civil War Memory Studies became a part of the academy, memory of the war played a central role in the writing of William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War by Michael Gorra published by Liveright 448 pages (2020). ![]()
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