“I have ruined your life,” he said to his brother’s widow, Louise. The novelist bore the guilt of this gift, and of introducing his youngest brother to flying, for the rest of his life. Her father, Dean, a dashing air-show pilot, died in a plane crash before she was born, piloting a craft given to him by his brother William. Wells’s own story reads like that of one of Faulkner’s heroines. But to Dean Faulkner Wells, he was and will always be “Pappy,” the patriarch at the center of a quintessential extended Southern family whose history is no less compelling and instructive than the many tales Faulkner weaved from its common threads. In 1950, when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner secured his legend with an unforgettable address in which he proclaimed the writer’s duty and privilege “to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.” Since that moment, Faulkner has been a bronzed icon, his “postage stamp of native soil,” Yoknapatawpha County, an allegorical staging ground for all the grand and small tragedies and triumphs of modernity.
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