I remember I put that hardback novel on my shelf like a trophy and stared at it in awe. I read the library bound book in a day, then proceeded to buy my own copy. The dark comedy was enticing, the book’s language profound, and the writing was merely poetic. Of course, I would not be like one of my tactless classmates and read SparkNotes instead of plowing through the relatively short piece of literature, so I read it and let us say it was love at first sight. The American Gothic novel sounded bland and boring, and I could not believe my English teacher, who I always thought had good taste in literature, was making us read this thing. I did not care that it was supposedly one of the best works of the 20th century.
I, a budding seventeen-year-old girl, had no interest in reading a book written by a dead man about a family of hillbillies hiking across the countryside to bury their dead mother. In high school, I was forced to read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying in my AP English class. Instead of recounting the exact details of how William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature on this day in 1949, I thought I would tell a tale of how I fell in love with the man that uniquely contributed to the modern American novel.
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