Stephen Enzweiler to Read Faulkner at Rowan Oak

September 20, 2007


OXFORD, Miss. - When the sun rises over Oxford, Mississippi this Tuesday, the air will be filled with the voices of literary luminaries as they gather at William Faulkner’s Rowan Oak home in Oxford to celebrate his 110 th birthday and read his epic work “Go Down Moses.” Among the voices there will be one southern writer who knows the Nobel Prize winning author on his own turf.

Stephen Enzweiler, a Journalist and short story author, has studied William Faulkner for more than 15 years. He was recently invited by the University of Mississippi Department of English to participate in the 110th birthday celebration because of his background both as a writer and for his comprehensive knowledge of Faulkner and the Southern Renaissance in literature.

“I’m excited to be able to read this particular work in the same place where it was written,” he says. “What’s special about Faulkner is he had a greater understanding of human nature than almost any other writer I can think of, including Steinbeck and Hemingway. You can see this in most of his works.

The reading of “Go Down Moses” will begin at 7 a.m. at Faulkner’s Rowan Oak estate in Oxford, and will involve more than 60 readers in all, each taking turns reading passages until the work is finished. Organizers believe it will take most of the day to get through the nearly 400-page book.

According to University of Mississippi English professor Stephen Monroe, one of the organizers of the celebration, notables from all over the literary world are expected to be there as well.

The celebration also marks the inaugural year of "Mississippi Reads" (www.MississippiReads.org), a statewide initiative that recognizes annually a Mississippi author while encouraging people to read that author’s works. The 110th birthday celebration is sponsored by the University of Mississippi Department of English, the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the University Museum.

At the conclusion of the reading, Enzweiler and other literary celebrants will partake in birthday cake, while the choir of East St. Peter's Missionary Baptist Church performs the book's namesake spiritual.

A Timeless Writer

To look at him in his own time, there was nothing about the man that stood out. For most of his life, William Faulkner could not hold a job and was always short of money. He drank frequently and excessively, and was a failure in almost everything he attempted—except for writing, which was a lifelong obsession.

In spite to his often wandering “stream-of-consciousness” writing style, he penned some of the most gripping stories of the human experience ever written. He went on to win numerous Pulitzer Prizes and National Book Awards, and was finally awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

Today, his writings are again growing in popularity as they are being rediscovered by a whole new generation of readers. Many literary scholar consider Faulkner to be America's greatest writer.

“Faulkner’s work endures because his stories address timeless human themes,” said Enzweiler. “They are questions and issues of the heart that exist in every generation.”



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