Joseph Blotner is one of America's most respected literary biographers, best known for his monumental Faulkner: A Biography (1974), but he is also a scholar, editor, and critic of considerable reputation. His distinguished academic career includes positions at some of America's finest universities. He has been a visiting professor both in America and abroad, and he has held many prestigious fellowships and advisory positions. Having recently finished the authorized biography of Robert Penn Warren, Blotner is a biographer and scholar-critic who, in a sense, writes biographies of literary works as much as of literary artists. As he has said himself, his emphasis falls more on the works than on the lives of his subjects. Like his subjects, Faulkner and Warren, Blotner is reserved in manner and reticent about his own life and work; he would prefer to talk about biographies and criticism by others he admires than to discuss...