The Unvanquished

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The Unvanquished is the story of Bayard's victory. William Faulkner's most romantic novel, it is clear and fast-moving. But when it first appeared, in 1938, its critical reception demonstrated the prevailing confusion about Faulkner's fiction. The range of opinions in the book reviews of the time proved the truth of the statement Robert Perm Warren later made: "The study of Faulkner is the most challenging single task in contemporary American literature for criticism to undertake."

Kay Boyle, always perceptive, was ahead of her time in her review of the novel when she credited Faulkner with "the strength and the vulnerability which belong only to the greatest artists: the incalculable emotional wealth, the racy comic sense, the fury to reproduce exactly not the recognizable picture but the unmistakable experience." She accorded The Unvanquished "that fabulous, that wondrous, fluxing power which nothing Faulkner touches is ever without." She went on to express an opinion less widely held then than today: that Faulkner is "the most absorbing writer of our time."

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