Many informed Americans now consider William Faulkner to be the greatest American fiction writer of the 20th century and just possibly in our history. But his achievement of such recognition came to him with a painful slowness. He was 53 when he won the Nobel Prize, and in his acceptance speech he described his life's work as having been accomplished "in the agony and sweat of the human spirit…." Many of us now know enough about his life to realize that he did not exaggerate.

A distressing element was the circumstance that those novels written in the agony of the human spirit did not sell…. Faulkner frequently complained to his close friends and his literary agents that as a consequence he was forced to grind out short stories for the Saturday Evening Post and such like magazines to keep bread and meat on the table. His other expedient was...