Speaking in 1964, Ralph Ellison described William Faulkner as the novelist who had brought “the impelling moral function of the novel and...the moral seriousness of the form...into explicit statement again.” On one level, Ellison described this move as consonant with what the “American novel at its best” (Melville, Twain, James, Fitzgerald, Hemingway are among those he mentions) had always done. On another, he described it as consonant with the “specific concerns of literature,” including explorations of “new possibilities of language.” But he also described it as a move that was natural and even necessary for Faulkner because he had “lived close to moral and political problems which would not stay put underground.”

Faulkner’s fiction owes something to his powers of observation and his ear for dialect, and something to his sense that human lives are always shaped by natural and social forces, which is to say, by instinct, and preconscious needs and desires, as well as by culture. His stories are rooted in history as both natural scene and cultural construct. In addition, his fiction owes much to stories and poems be had read and tales he had heard, some of them about the adventures of his own prominent family in North Mississippi. As stories based on direct observation, his novels come to us as more or less organized reports on observed realities. As stories rooted in history, they remind us of the historicity of all deeds done and all words spoken. As stories anchored in individual consciousnesses – the memories and imaginations of narrators of diverse needs and desires as well as mixed strengths and weaknesses – his novels seem necessary and revealing in some moments, tricky and even deceitful in others.