The Summer of Faulkner: Oprah's Book Club, William Faulkner, and Twenty-first-Century America

On Friday, Jun 3, 2005, Oprah Winfrey made a startling announcement: Oprah's Book Club (OBC), her enormous reading group, had chosen for its summer selection three of William Faulkner's most critically acclaimed novels. As I Lay Dying was scheduled for June, The Sound and the Fury for July, and Light in August, appropriately, for August. The program amounted to a whole Summer of Faulkner, as she billed it. Reactions were swift and for the most part skeptical. From the start, then, it was clear that the promise and threat of the Summer of Faulkner lay in the encounter it was staging between an interpretive community consisting of hundreds of thousands of nonacademic readers and a writer alternately celebrated and vilified for his high modernist impenetrability. Evidence for this popular Faulkner, an artist engaged with and available to popular audiences up to and including Oprah's huge online reading community, abounds if you just look in the right places.