William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Speech

"I believe that man will not merely endure. He will prevail." But it was a quieter claim in the same speech that more securely gives voice to the sustained labor of this writer at his desk in Oxford, tirelessly inventing imaginative structures of human pain and defeat and momentary triumph. "I feel that this award was not made to me as a man," Faulkner wrote, "but to my work, a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before."

William Faulkner is without a doubt the best writer I have ever read. Having beaten my head against James Joyce's Ulysses, there is in my mind no doubt who the superior writer is. But, does this extract from his acceptance speech for the 1949 Nobel Prize mean that to be a good storyteller, in the manner that Faulkner was, I must be optimistic about mankind? My stories written with some kind of adoration? I see the average man as contemptible (not that I have contempt for him), yes there is love, yes there is the desire for his best, not with any pessimism either, but there is also the fact that the average man is a depraved hick, a moron whose inbreeding is of the intellectual sort rather than the genetic.