"Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect"--celebrating the centennial of the writer's birth in 1897--proved to be the largest in the 24-year history of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. Well over 400 Faulkner enthusiasts from around the world gathered to listen to and meet 30 Faulkner scholars and special guests, who were once again attempting to come to grips with the life and work of the writer widely regarded as the finest American novelist of the 20th century.

The range of issues discussed and positions put forth was as diverse as the range of scholars in attendance. Faulkner's first full-scale biographer, Joseph Blotner, reminisced on his friendship with Faulkner in the late 1950s, while novelist and critic Albert Murray, in his lecture "Me, Uncle Billy, and the American Mythosphere," re-created the perspective of a young African American student at Tuskegee Institute reading Faulkner in the 1930s; Noel Polk and Lothar Honnighausen focused on the image of multiple Faulkners playing multiple roles, while Judith L. Sensibar analyzed the significance for his art on Faulkner's relations with his wife, Estelle.

Andre Bleikasten called for renewed attention to the "singularity" of Faulkner's fiction, a position that Richard Moreland, Thadious Davis, and Carolyn Porter sought to augment with emphasis on the powerful cultural forces through which, and by means of which, Faulkner had to discover his voice. John T. Matthews identified a "miscegenation" of white and black dialects as central to Faulkner's sense of national identity, and Doreen Fowler and Arthur Kinney explored the Otherness of African American and Native American peoples in Faulkner's fiction.

In addition to the formal lectures and panel presentations there were three exhibitions--Faulkner's mother's paintings, photographs from the Cofield Collection, and Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain, including photos not printed in Dain's book, Faulkner's Country, published in 1964. Other program events included Voices from Yoknapatawpha, readings from Faulkner's works selected and arranged by conference founding director Evans Harrington; announcement of the winner of the eighth annual Faux Faulkner contest, Wendy Goldberg, who read her prize-winning entry, "Dyin' to Lie Down"; a reading by novelist and short story writer Randall Kenan, the John and Renee Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi for Fall 1997; and a day of guided tours of North Mississippi.

There were also presentations by members of Faulkner's family and friends, as well as a series of social gatherings, culminating with a closing party at the Gary Home, one of the houses Faulkner lived in while growing up in Oxford.

Neither a week of continuous 90 degree days nor a characteristically full schedule of events seemed to wilt or dampen the ardor of registrants and presenters. One hundred years after his birth, Faulkner's hold on the world's imagination seems secure; and in a year of centennials and commemorations in his honor, Oxford remains the central ground of remembrance: "There are other places," as T. S. Eliot wrote of another historic location, "but this is the nearest, in place and time."

Donald M. Kartiganer