experience, i would hope people would have the experience that i have had a falling in love with a place and having it mean so much to you and your own experience in being alive and i would just hope that they would have that joy that i get every day, and that privilege that if you are being able to live here. in this little city i love. >> i'm here at university of virginia library with molly schwartzburg, curator of the special collections and she's going to be showing us their current exhibit on william faulkner. >> we are in the main gallery of the albert and shirley small special collections library at university of virginia. our current expedition is fall in her life work. this was a large expedition surveying the magnificent william faulkner collections that we have here at the

library. william faulkner was a great american novelist who was born in mississippi and spent the last few years of his career in the late 1950s and early 1960s at uva. his his best-known for his novels that sound and the fury, and is also a poet and a short story writer. it's been quite a long time since our last monumental fall. expedition even though we often the individual items out or put on display in other contexts, we haven't really told the full story and given the public access to his huge range of interest in the collections for quite some time. it also is the 60th anniversary of his arrival at the university as writer and resident. we still have people coming to visit who tell us about having met faulkner while they were here. while he was at uva he was working on his own writing.

also spent a lot of time here in formal and informal events meeting with students, faculty, committee members, faculty wives, female students from local or nearby women's colleges since uva was only meant at the time. other groups to talk about his novels, about the state of literature today and pretty much anything else that they asked him about. he also really enjoyed living in virginia. yet always had a dream to learn to pox on and you learned to fox at while he was here and joined the farmington hunt and would go foxhunting on the weekends whenever he possibly could. we have a lot of wonderful artifacts of course from his time at uva, many that have come from uva sources. among other things with a typewriter he was issued by university even with the university property step on the back. we have a jacket that he wore. he come as you can see when you look at the jacket is pretty

torn up and ratty here he liked to keep his close for a long time. he left his jacket hanging in his office we went on his last trip to oxford, mississippi, when he passed away. in the pocket of the jacket was a pipe and some pipe cleaners and we even put a pipe cleaners on display because we just thought visitors would enjoy that close connection to faulkner. the collections are so vast that it was difficult to decide how to tell the story of his lifetime. so what we decide to do was look at the various persona that were constructed either by faulkner actively or by the circumstances in which he found himself throughout his life. and structure the episode around us. there are 13 different aspects of his personality displayed. we tried to cover the very personal, professional and the lesser-known. for instance, i don't think very many people know that faulkner was a wonderful artist andy drew all the way through his life.

a lot of people also don't know that you did really interesting work after he won the nobel as a sort of literary ambassador working for the u.s. state department. we tried to pull out some unexpected stories and also show some of the most iconic items in the collection. >> symmetries that demonstrate faulkner's family history are also on display. one do we place front and center at the beginning of the exhibition is actually from long before faulkner was born and it is a receipt for a slave sold by his grandfather. we thought it was important to put that in the exhibition to point out just how important that history was to have faulkner developed as a writer. the issue of slavery, the issue of race relations in the south. these are central to his work and are revered as topics covered with the brilliance and

care throughout his work. we really wanted to make sure that we put that really interesting artifacts on display as a symbol of this problem that he inherited. one of the interesting episodes to me is when he spent time in hollywood as a screenwriter. faulkner would not agree. he did particularly like his time in hollywood. it was a job that he took writing screenplays for the studios to make money. he was having a very hard time making ends meet because his writing was very difficult. books were not selling as well as it might have if they were more readable. he needed to find other ways to support his family. screenwriting worked for him for a long time turkey did screenwriting work off and on for a couple of decades. the items on display are really quite wonderful. probably my favorite item is a a fragment of his screenplay for the film the big sleep which is of course considered a masterpiece of films for its time. in one of his essays in the

1950s faulkner refers to himself as having the position of a white southerner. so he took that and said what is this white southerner figure that faulkner inhabits asked anyone who approaches faulkner's works cease and engaging with problem of race, and he saw himself very much as having a challenging position in relation especially to the african-american community around oxford, and members of that community feature infection form throughout his work. a section of the expedition called white southerner looks in particular at how faulkner grappled with questions of racial identity in the south in the 1950s. 1950s. he wins of the nobel prize in 1950, and from that point on his fame just explodes. his books are sold in massive quantities and he's known, he becomes sort of a household name. at the same time the civil rights movement is starting to gather steam, and the debate

over integration become more and more vocal, and more and more polarizing in the united states. so faulkner begins to be called upon as a public figure to comment upon integration. he is even asked when he is abroad in foreign countries as an american, as a southern america, tell us what you think about this issue. because of course all over the world issues having to do with integration are being reported. have a lot of documents that show faulkner trying hard to figure out how to determine his own position on integration. what's wonderful about this document is they show that faulkner found itself sort of stuck between different positions. on the one hand his view that integration needed to happen put it at odds with a lot of whites in mississippi. however, he often called for a slow gradualist move towards integration, which put him at odds with the northerners. he also felt he had a loyalty o

the sounds we did want a north to tell the south what to do. so he is constantly grappling and shifting his perspective over time. as an intellectual of this moment, his perspective is really unusual and really interesting, and i found that visitors will find a lot to think about in that section. i'd have to say that's probably where i learned the most. we want all audiences to enjoy this exhibition. so if you're a faulkner fanatic you'll be able to commune with the manuscripts of works, and if you're not a faulkner fanatic, if you even may be had symptomatic with faulkner in high school, we want you to understand his biography. his life story is really interesting. we want people to come away with a sense of faulkner as an entire person, the whole person and all other aspects of his life story that influenced his ability to sit down and write these masterpieces. so much of his time was spent

struggling to make money, struggling to care for his family. it's really remarkable to see what he accomplished. we also want people to get a sense of the full range of material that can be found in a literary archive. it's a real treasure and we are so happy to be able to share it. >> wwe're at the rotunda at thomas jefferson university virginia. up next to speak with rita dove, professor and former u.s. poet laureate. [applause] >> the 2011 national medal of arts to rita dove for her contributions to american letters and a service as poet laureate of the united states from 1993-1995.