Michael Gorra

The New York Review Classics series has done much to keep canonical writers in print, having already published in smart paperback editions three lesser-known novels by Henry James: The Other House, The Outcry, and The Ivory Tower. These two new additions to the series, a selection of James’s essays ‘on writers and writing’, edited by eminent James scholar Michael Gorra, and a critical discussion of James’s The American Scene by Yale emeritus professor Peter Brooks, make further valuable contributions to the NYRB library.

André Gide, when asked who was the greatest French poet, is said to have replied ‘Victor Hugo, alas’, and many readers have responded in similar fashion to William Faulkner’s place in the history of the American novel. Werner Sollors, the eminent Harvard scholar of American Literature, unambiguously described Faulkner in 2003 as ‘ultimately the most significant American novelist of the [twentieth] century’, a judgement echoed in this book by Michael Gorra, who calls him ‘the most important American novelist of the twentieth century’. But Faulkner’s marked proclivity for both stylistic excess and thematic incoherence has always made him a difficult author to appreciate and study. Hence Gorra’s The Saddest Words, a judicious and measured blend of biography, contextual history, and travelogue, performs a signal service in making this complicated author more accessible to a wider reading public.