‘To Put it all into Words is a Hell of a Hard Thing’: Faulkner’s Adaptation of History and Fiction in A Ghost Story/War Birds
Keywords
Hollywood career, screenwriting, scholarly attention
Abstract
William Faulkner first came to Hollywood in 1932 because, as Joseph Blotner notes in Faulkner: A Biography, he had been told that he could make between 500 and 750 dollars a week in Hollywood. In a letter to his wife in November of 1931 he wrote, “if all that money is out there, I might as well hack a little on the side and put the novel [probably Light in August] off” (Blotner 727). When he finished his last work for Hollywood in 1954 he had, according to Sarah Gleeson-White, written or collaborated on at least fifty screenplays. This significant body of work has been studied by Tom Dardis, Bruce Kawin, Peter Lurie, Gene Phillips, and most recently by Gleeson-White, among others. But it demands still more careful scholarly attention. As Gleeson-White concludes in William Faulkner at Twentieth Century-Fox: The Annotated Screenplays, “any future considerations of Faulkner the writer—in all senses of the word—need to negotiate the multilayered dynamics and contingencies of his Hollywood screenwriting career” (759).
Original Publication Citation
“‘To Put it all into Words is a Hell of a Hard Thing’: Faulkner’s Adaptation of History and Fiction in A Ghost Story/War Birds.” Literature Film Quarterly, vol 48, no. 1, 2020, https://lfq.salisbury.edu/. Accessed 22 Jan. 2020.
BYU ScholarsArchive Citation
Cutchins, Dennis, "‘To Put it all into Words is a Hell of a Hard Thing’: Faulkner’s Adaptation of History and Fiction in A Ghost Story/War Birds" (2020). Faculty Publications. 9654.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/facpub/9654
Document Type
Peer-Reviewed Article
Publication Date
2020
Publisher
Literature Film Quarterly
Language
English
College
Humanities
Department
English
Copyright Use Information
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