Chapter 11 - William Faulkner, Public Intellectual

Summary

Could there be any definition of the “public intellectual” – a contested term introduced only in 1987 – that fits so famously private a man as William Faulkner?¹ During the years following his reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature (he won the 1949 award, though it was not given until 1950), Faulkner was approached routinely for his views on many contemporary issues, from the early Cold War tensions he addressed in his brief, celebrated Nobel speech to the increasingly visible – and, for white southerners, unavoidable – African American struggle for civil rights that would consume his native region well beyond his death in 1962. But Faulkner had little of the natural aptitude for the camera that other postwar figures such as James Baldwin and Malcolm X displayed, and none of the lust for celebrity of the likes of Norman Mailer.