William Faulkner

William Faulkner is a personal hero of mine. In addition to being one of only seven authors in history to win both the Nobel and the Pulitzer prizes for literature, Faulkner wrote about mental illness in a time when the subject was even more of a cultural taboo than it is today. Literary critics actually speculate that Faulkner’s characters may have been living with autism, depression, schizophrenia, and PTSD. Faulkner himself notoriously battled chronic depression, and Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist and author of Touched by Fire, believes that his biographical data may indicate that he actually suffered from Bipolar Disorder. For years, I have read The Sound and the Fury every winter. In many ways, the book has saved my life. As he writes in Absalom, Absalom!, “surely there is something in madness.”