Light in August (Faulkner)

Book Reviews
To say that Light in August is an astonishing performance is not the use the word lightly.... Not only does Faulkner emerge from this book a stylist of striking strength and beauty: he permits some of his people, if not his chief protagonist, to act sometimes out of motives which are human in their decency.... In a word, Faulkner has admitted justice and compassion to his scheme of things.
J. Donald Adams - New York Times (10/9/1932)

The critics...now tell us that his style is florid, that his plots are hard to follow, that he sometimes shows bad taste in his choice of material.... On the other hand, I can think of no other living American author who writes with the same intensity or who carries us so completely into a world of his own. There is no American author or our time who has undertaken and partly completed a more ambitious series of novels and stories..... Faulkner has been writing a sort of human comedy that was partly inspired by his reading of Balzac.
Malcolm Cowley - New York Times ( 10/29/1944)

Faulkner...belongs to the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust.
Edmund Wilson

For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must return to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness of our classics.
Ralph Ellison

For all the range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style, variety of characterization, humor, and tragic intensity, [Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country.
Robert Penn Warren