Whatever the various roles he played and whatever his occasional claims that he was not at all a “literary man,” William Faulkner was in fact the most devoted of artists. He was absolutely dedicated to the work, and, as this volume demonstrates, he was fascinated with the personality, the generative process, and the practice of the artist.

These fourteen original essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1993 at the University of Mississippi, explore a wide range of issues revolving around the meaning of art, artistry, and the artist in Faulkner’s life and fiction. Here some of Faulkner’s most fervent readers and critics assess the impact on him of the visual arts and architecture, the role of artist figures in such novels as The Sound and the Fury and The Wild Palms, as well as their guise as lawyers in Sanctuary, Go Down, Moses, and The Town, and the meaning of “telling” and “design” as exemplified both in the actions of fictional characters and in Faulkner’s narrative strategies.