A short life of the author
Joan Williams (26 September 1928 – 11 July 2004) was an American novelist and short story writer from Memphis, Tennessee, whose fiction is rooted in the rural and small-town South and whose life was profoundly shaped by her relationship with William Faulkner, whom she met in 1949 when she was twenty-one and he was fifty-two. Faulkner became her mentor, her literary champion, and — in a complicated, largely epistolary way — her lover. The relationship lasted until the mid-1950s, and its influence pervades Williams’s fiction, which deals with the themes of isolation, family obligation, racial tension, and the difficulty of escaping the weight of Southern tradition.
The Faulkner Relationship
Williams first wrote to Faulkner as a student at Bard College in 1949, sending him a short story and asking for his assessment. He responded with encouragement, and their correspondence grew into an intense literary and emotional relationship. Faulkner helped her revise her work, pushed her to develop her own voice, and wrote her letters of extraordinary frankness about his own creative process, his drinking, his unhappy marriage, and his feelings for her.
The relationship was asymmetric in every way — in age, fame, power, and emotional investment — and Williams later wrote about it with a mixture of gratitude, ambivalence, and hard-won clarity. The Faulkner–Williams letters, published after both their deaths, are a remarkable literary document and an unusually intimate record of a great writer’s working life.
The Morning and the Evening (1961)
Williams’s first novel tells the story of a mentally disabled man in a small Mississippi town and the community that alternately protects and exploits him. The novel won the John P. Marquand Award for the best first novel of the year and was praised for its empathetic rendering of small-town Southern life and its unflinching treatment of poverty and disability. The influence of Faulkner is present in the setting and the attention to community dynamics, but the voice is Williams’s own — quieter, more restrained, and more directly compassionate.
The Wintering (1971)
Williams’s second novel is a thinly veiled account of her relationship with Faulkner — the story of a young woman writer who becomes involved with an older, famous, married writer. The novel was controversial for its apparent intimacy with its source material and was read by many as a roman à clef about the most famous American writer of the twentieth century. It is both a love story and a portrait of the power dynamics inherent in mentor-protégée relationships.
Old Powder Man (1966) and Later Work
Old Powder Man is a novel about an ageing dynamite salesman in the Mississippi Delta — a character study of a man whose dangerous profession has given him a philosophy of life built on risk and impermanence. Williams also published short stories in The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker, and she contributed to a collaborative Faulkner biography.
Critical Standing
Joan Williams is a minor figure in American letters — her output was small, her reputation has not grown since her death, and she is remembered primarily in connection with Faulkner. This is partly unfair. The Morning and the Evening is a genuinely fine novel, and her short stories have a quality of observation and emotional restraint that deserves more attention than it has received. She is one of those writers whose work is overshadowed by a more famous life.
Collecting Williams
The Morning and the Evening (1961, Atheneum) in first edition with dust jacket is the primary collectible. The Wintering (1971) is of interest to Faulkner collectors. Williams’s correspondence with Faulkner is held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.