The Center for Fiction Presents: Who Was William Faulkner?

William Faulkner continues to engage and provoke readers and writers across the international landscape. In 2025 The Center for Fiction, in partnership with the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, will offer programming around Faulkner and his work that will allow readers a lens into his work, his influence and the man. Who was William Faulkner and why are we still so influenced by his work today? To answer the former, scholars Carl Rollyson (The Life of William Faulkner) and Jerry W. Carlson will come together to discuss Faulkner’s life, influences, and work. From his early years as a child in post-Civil War America to his time as a Hollywood screenwriter and, finally, as one of the most lasting and influential voices of the American South, Faulkner’s life is as compelling as the stories it helped shape.

Professor Jerry W. Carlson is a historian of narrative forms with special expertise in narrative theory, the history of the novel, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas. From 2013 to 2022 he served as Chair of the Department of Media & Communication Arts at The City College CUNY. In addition, at the CUNY Graduate Center he is a member of the doctoral faculties of French, Comparative Literature, and Film & Media Cultures and a Senior Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies. His current research is focused on how film and prose fiction from the Global South portray the histories and legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism.

Carl Rollyson is the author of The Life of William Faulkner in two volumes, William Faulkner Day by Day, Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner, and the forthcoming Faulkner On and Off the Page: Essays in Biographical Criticism. His essay, “The Indispensable Faulkner” appears in the January issue of National Review.

Photo credit: Van Vechten, Carl, photographer. Portrait of William Faulkner., 1954. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2004662863/.