Mark Royden Winchell, Author at The Imaginative Conservative

About Mark Royden Winchell

Mark Royden Winchell (1948-2008) was Professor of English at Clemson University and a prolific writer on Southern culture, the arts, and history. His works include Reinventing the South: Versions of a Literary Region and Too Good to Be True: The Life and Work of Leslie Fiedler.

Understanding William Faulkner

By Mark Royden Winchell|2025-09-24T15:06:12-05:00September 24th, 2025|Categories: Books, Cleanth Brooks, Imagination, John Crowe Ransom, Literature, South, Timeless Essays|

In the forties and fifties, Cleanth Brooks devoted himself to interpreting and popularizing the work of one of America’s greatest but most difficult novelists, his fellow Southerner William Faulkner. When I think of the state of literary criticism in the academy today, I think of a New Yorker cartoon someone has put up in the [...]

William Faulkner and the American Dream

By Mark Royden Winchell|2021-09-24T23:38:16-05:00May 19th, 2017|Categories: Books, Culture, Literature, South|

For William Faulkner, the American Dream lay in the promise of true community, where manners and customs regulate behavior. In a mere society, man’s actions are constrained only by brute force (either public or private) or by the fear of force. On the Prejudices, Predilections, and Firm Beliefs of William Faulkner by Cleanth Brooks (Louisiana State [...]