IN FAULKNER'S SHADOW

In this memoir, a man reflects on his marriage to William Faulkner’s niece and the long shadow cast by the famous writer’s legacy.

Wells didn’t anticipate the place Faulkner and his books would assume in his life—he didn’t read the novelist’s works until his senior year as an English major at the University of Alabama. Years later, while taking a seminar on Beowulf at the University of Mississippi, Wells met Dean, Faulkner’s only niece. She was the daughter of Faulkner’s younger brother, also named Dean. The connection between Dean and Wells wasn’t immediately romantic—“I never even fantasized about her.” He was married with two kids at the time, but as that union dissolved, Dean became his confidante and then eventually something more. They married in 1972, and Wells became inexorably drawn into Faulkner’s complex legacy and a family that often struggled with it, a situation he artfully describes: “To those born without it genius can be a forbidding heritage. When William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize his kith and kin became trapped in his shadow. After his death Dean observed that she and her relatives built walls shielding themselves not just from outsiders but from one another.” Wells recounts his own immersion in the Faulkner cosmos. He became the director of the Yoknapatawpha Press, an indie publishing firm named after the fictional county created by Faulkner, and wrote a novel in which the literary giant figures as a protagonist. The best of this captivating book, though, is not Wells’ account of the ways in which he was “swallowed by the Faulkner mystique” but the loving homage he pays to Dean. She bore a “stunning resemblance” to her uncle and even “showed flashes of elegant imperiousness” that Wells believed were an inheritance from Faulkner. This is a remarkable memoir, endearingly personal and astutely literary.

An engrossing account of the family and town Faulkner left behind when he died.