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“No, not if you don’t want to,” Faulkner told her.

In her final illness, at age 88, Maud asked her son if she would have to see her husband in heaven. To make matters worse, Murry Falkner was an alcoholic who frequently withdrew into long periods of apathy and self-pity. As Joseph Blotner and other Faulkner biographers (most recently Jay Parini) have told us, Maud Falkner was an intelligent, well-educated, talented, and strong-willed woman who was married to a husband who was never much of a success in anything he attempted. In fact, the characterization of Addie Bundren may be modeled in part on two individuals whom Faulkner knew very well: his mother and himself. But there are elements in As I Lay Dying that are almost certainly drawn from Faulkner’s personal experience. It’s highly doubtful that Faulkner (or any other Mississippian) ever saw a family transporting an unembalmed, decaying corpse on a week-long trek through the north Mississippi countryside, shooing away the buzzards along the way. Faulkner frequently noted that he used “experience, observation, and imagination” in creating his characters and plots and though he always insisted that the imagination was the key component, he also acknowledged the personal element in his work. The Hemingway hero is not Ernest Hemingway, though Hemingway’s protagonists clearly have a great deal in common with their creator. In 2005 Professor Hamblin led the Oprah Book Club's online discussions of As I Lay Dying for Oprah Winfrey's "Summer of Faulkner." Those discussions included a number of video-taped mini-lectures on the characters, themes, structure, and context of the novel. Teaching Faulkner is pleased to offer the transcribed texts of those lectures to our readers.Īutobiographical Elements Almost all writers incorporate their own personal experiences into their work, though it would be a huge mistake ever to argue for a direct correlation between an author and a character.