William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. In this imaginative biography, Philip M. Weinstein-a leading authority on Faulkner-targets this disjunction as one among a number of paradoxes that defined Faulkner's experience of the world. Weinstein conjures the forces at play as Faulkner came of age--a racially divided country, a separatist family legacy, a susceptibility to mythology and to alcohol--and considers the ways these factors informed his often turbulent circumstances. He suggests that Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history become fully understandable only when traced out into his writing, which took the charged material of personal frustrations and translated it into a singular language that captured human consciousness as never before. Juxtaposing Faulkner's personal story with the remarkable representation of Southern life in his novels, Weinstein has produced a sharp, fresh biography. Featuring 20 black-and-white images, Becoming Faulkner testifies to the singular psychology of a man whose world unfolded somewhere between art and life.