IN 1956 the Paris Review published a charmingly trenchant interview with William Faulkner. Like his novels, the man himself vacillated between cagey misdirection and evangelistic confidence:

INTERVIEWER

Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them? FAULKNER

Read it four times.

As glib as Faulkner's response is, it does communicate a central truth about his writing. Like a multiplier effect, his work generously rewards rereading. Thankfully, no one endorses this belief more heartily than Faulkner's publisher, Random House, which is commemorating the 50th anniversary of his death by releasing six deluxe editions of his most renowned, modernist novels and collected stories over this spring and summer. (Thankfully the new editions defy the more conventional packaging of his novels, which tend to feature that dreadful quill-pen font or a picture of floodwater rushing past a steel lean-to shack.)



This is easily the biggest news to hit Faulknerites since Oprah's long, hot Summer of Faulkner in 2005. Remember when everybody was reading "The Sound and the Fury" in their gingham dresses and wife-beaters? (Take that, Steinbeck, you hack screenwriter.) But now that Faulkner Ultra-Lite "The Help" fever has morphed into "Hunger Games" Young Adult zeal, now is as good a time as any to remind folks of what may be the greatest winning streak in literature. The six works represented—eight if you count "Snopes" as a trilogy—is quite simply an unassailable fortress of literary perfection, positively reeking with excellence, and shining like a beacon of human enlightenment into the icy cosmos. That one can rightfully proclaim this without a twinge of doubt raises the question: Why is Faulkner so underread? Most people when they hear “Yoknapatawpha” might think it's a trending baby name in Detroit.



It may very well be regional. In most English classrooms in the South, Faulkner is hard to evade. I spent an entire year of high school sitting in front of a "Light in August" poster. I would daydream at the title and the grainy shafts of light that lambently danced through the branches onto a sepia dirt road. I wanted to amble down it and see where it would lead. I had no idea that it led to a black-blooded castration in the kitchen of a defrocked, civil war-obsessed minister, but you live and learn. It is true, though, Faulkner is not for everyone.



One of my best friends in high school was assigned "The Sound and the Fury" in his AP English class. He took it home, opened it, and promptly hurled it across the room. Picking it up, I decided to take a crack at it just to be contrarian and to see what could make my normally sensible and brainy friend into a Faulkner-cursing lunatic. The infamous Benjy chapter was definitely unlike anything else I had read, but it was far from unreadable. In fact, it was gushing with poetry, emotion and enticing snippets of dialogue. Eventually, I started catching on to the fact that Benjy is jumping around in time like Dr Who; you can track him by which character is looking after him. This was kind of cool. If it's your own first time with "The Sound and the Fury", it may help to think of it like this: after the Benjy fire swamp there is the lightning sand that is the Quentin section, and then the rat of unusual size that is Jason Compson, and then you're home free with Dilsey in the fourth and final section.



To put too fine a point on it, my Faulkner professor once wrote on the chalkboard: “Reading is [blank].” He then entertained answers from the class, which were all over the map, as one would expect. Afterward, he filled in the blank to his own question with one word: “pleasurable”. It was so obvious no one thought of it. It dawned on you how much people think of reading as work, as labour, as some tedious chore, when it should be quite the opposite.



The mistake that is made with Faulkner is that most of us are forced to read him well before we've seen and experienced enough to truly appreciate his work. (No one wants to watch "The Breakfast Club" by Stanley Kubrick.) We too often see images of Faulkner as the stern silver-maned, sharp-mustachioed aristocrat in the houndstooth jacket, pipe in hand, who now foists his terribly dense prose on precocious students. But he was also a young, artsy, hilarious and unforgiving observer of human nature. The issues and themes that Faulkner treats in his novels and stories are eternal. Like any great writer, he crafted permanent monuments out of elementary materials—the old verities and truths of the heart, if you will—in the same tradition as his predecessors. Strangers come to town in "Light in August" and "Absalom, Absalom!" The Chaucerian journey is made in "As I Lay Dying". Epic farce is on display in "Snopes", and family drama gets positively freaky Greeky in "The Sound and the Fury". The difference is he did it better than most. These 50th-anniversary commemorative editions will hopefully remind us that Faulkner is not dead. He's not even past.