Every Day by the Sun by Dean Faulkner Wells

Wells says “Every Day by the Sun” is a kind of thank-you note to her uncle - who, in taking care of her, “had fulfilled his promise to my father” - but it is also a testament to her own gifts as a writer.Īmerican novelist William Faulkner at his home in Rowan Oaks near Oxford, Miss., in 1950. When Wells was a Pee Wee football cheerleader, Faulkner even stayed to watch the games, sitting in the same seat, wearing his signature hat. In her telling, Faulkner is less a literary icon than a quirky uncle who took her sailing, escorted her trick-or-treating, showed her how to clean a gun, and drove her to and from school. But Wells’s personalized rendition brings a warmth to the lore. Much of this may not be news to Faulkner scholars and aficionados. “William wrote on the back of a wheelbarrow he had turned upside down,” Wells reports. Yet Wells insists, “I never saw William Faulkner drunk.” There are beguiling tales about Faulkner’s struggle toward literary stardom - his days as a bitter postal worker who discarded any mail not sent first class and his efforts to write “As I Lay Dying” while working the night shift at a power plant. Her father, William’s younger brother Dean, was killed in a plane crash months before Wells was born, and her stepfather, an abusive alcoholic, flitted in and out of her life before dying on skid row in Chicago when Wells was in her 20s.Īs one might expect from a story about the Faulkners, “Every Day by the Sun” features plenty of high jinks involving booze and women.

“Every Day by the Sun” is simply an account of her experiences with the man who essentially raised her. Wells, who died last summer at 75, made no claims as an official biographer.

But as she grew older, Wells became something of a star herself, as an author, co-owner of a small publishing house, literary salon hostess and, perhaps most important, the “last primary source” about her famous uncle. Even at her own wedding, she writes in her memoir, Every Day by the Sun (Broadway, $15), “every eye in the church was on Pappy” as he walked her down the aisle. Dean Faulkner Wells spent most of her life as a footnote in the story of her uncle William Faulkner.

Every Day by the Sun by Dean Faulkner Wells