BEFUDDLED BIOGRAPHER

The onus for accuracy, truthfulness and objective description certainly (or so it would seem) belongs to the biographer. Yet, in writing of the life and psyche of William Faulkner, Karl describes him in a blatantly subjective voice as “America’s greatest novelist of the 20th Century.” I sincerely feel that any omnipotent attempt to crown someone, anyone with the title “greatest,” be it spoken or written, be prefaced with the phrase “Once upon a time” in order to impose some semblance of objectivity. William Faulkner is one of America’s greatest novelists, but who is to say that he and not Hemingway or Steinbeck or Updike or Bellow is the absolute king of America’s literary mountain?

JOHN EMERSON

SHERMAN OAKS