Robert W. Hamblin Robert W. Hamblin Robert Wayne Hamblin is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, where he has taught since 1965. During his career as teacher, scholar, and writer, his writings have included both creative writings and nonfiction essays, but he is perhaps best known for his published work on the fiction of William Faulkner, which includes a scholarly journal and several volumes containing miscellaneous writings by and memorabilia about Faulkner.

Hamblin was born on November 5, 1938, in Jericho (Union County), Mississippi, and spent his boyhood years at nearby Brice’s Cross Roads, or Bethany, where his father and mother owned and operated a general store just across the road from the park and monument marking the site of the famous Civil War battle in which General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s Confederate cavalry unit ambushed and routed superior Union forces under the command of General Samuel Sturgis. Hamblin attended public schools in Baldwyn until 1954, when his family moved to Booneville; two years later he was graduated from Booneville High School. Hamblin attended college at Northeast Mississippi Community College in Booneville and Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi, earning his bachelor’s degree in English education from the latter in 1960. Subsequently he earned his master’s (1965) and doctoral (1976) degrees in English, both from the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he specialized in the works of William Faulkner under the direction of Professor John Pilkington. Hamblin started his teaching career as a high school English teacher and baseball coach at Sparrows Point High School in Baltimore County, Maryland. One of the players he coached was Ron Swoboda, whom (Hamblin claims) he taught to make diving catches like the one Swoboda made to save game four of the 1969 World Series for the New York Mets. Hamblin was a graduate student at Ole Miss during the first days of desegregation. As a member of the Mississippi National Guard federalized by President Kennedy, he was a witness to the riot that occurred on the eve of James Meredith’s enrollment in the university. Three years later Hamblin witnessed another racial confrontation at Ole Miss, the one that accompanied the participation by a bi-racial delegation from Tougaloo College in the Southern Literary Festival. Hamblin has described these events in two essays: “Monuments and Roads: One White Southerner’s Education in Civil Rights” and “The 1965 Southern Literary Festival: A Microcosm of the Civil Rights Movement.” In 1978 Hamblin met Louis Daniel Brodsky, the noted Faulkner collector from St. Louis. Since that time the two men have worked together to produce books, articles, and public lectures based on the materials in the Brodsky Collection — most notably Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection (5 vols., UP of Mississippi, 1982-88). In 1989 Southeast Missouri State University acquired the Brodsky Collection and created its Center for Faulkner Studies. Hamblin has been the director of the Center since its inception. Hamblin has taught Faulkner seminars for both the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Missouri Humanities Council. He is one of the originators of the “Teaching Faulkner” sessions at the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference at the University of Mississippi and edits Teaching Faulkner, a newsletter devoted to the teaching of Faulkner works in university, college, and high school classes. He is currently co-editing, with Professor Charles A. Peek (University of Nebraska at Kearney) A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, scheduled for publication by Greenwood Press in 1999. In addition to his Faulkner and Southern Studies work, Hamblin has published a volume of poems, From the Ground Up (1992); a study of college basketball, Win or Win: A Season with Ron Shumate (1993); and a number of essays on sport literature. He is presently working on a volume of sports poems tentatively entitled The Pole Vaulter and Other Heroes. Hamblin serves as poetry editor of Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature and as associate editor of The Cape Rock, a little magazine of poetry.

Related Links & Info Links from Yahoo! Get Local Baldwyn Boonville Monument and cannon at Brice’s Cross Roads National Battlefield Site Hamblin edits or co-edits the following periodical publications: Teaching Faulkner Newsletter Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature The Cape Rock

Publications

Nonfiction:

• (edited with Louis Daniel Brodsky) Selections from the William Faulkner Collection of Louis Daniel Brodsky. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,1979.
• (with Louis Daniel Brodsky) William Faulkner: A Perspective from the Brodsky Collection. Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University, 1979.
• (edited with Louis Daniel Brodsky) Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection. 5 vols. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1982-1988.
  • Volume I: The Biobibliography, 1982.
  • Volume II: The Letters, 1984.
  • Volume III: The De Gaulle Story, 1984.
  • Volume IV: Battle Cry, 1985.
  • Volume V: Manuscripts and Documents, 1988.
• (with Louis Daniel Brodsky) Faulkner and Hollywood: A Retrospective from the Brodsky Collection. Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University, 1984.
• (edited with Louis Daniel Brodsky) Country Lawyer and Other Stories for the Screen, by William Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987.
• (with Louis Daniel Brodsky) The Brodsky Faulkner Collection, 1959-1989: The Collector’s 101 Favorites. Southeast Missouri State University: The Center for Faulkner Studies, 1989.
• (edited with Louis Daniel Brodsky) Stallion Road: A Screenplay by William Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.
• Win or Win: A Season with Ron Shumate. Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri University Foundation, 1992.
• “No Such Thing As Was”: William Faulkner and Southern History. Cape Girardeau, Missouri: Center for Faulkner Studies, 1994.
• (edited with Charles A. Peek.) A William Faulkner Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
• (edited with Ann J. Abadie.) Faulkner in the Twenty-first Century. Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2000. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2003.

Poetry:

• Perpendicular Rain (chapbook). Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University, 1986.
• From the Ground Up: Poems of One Southerner’s Passage to Adulthood. St. Louis: Time Being Books, 1992.
• The Pole Vaulter and Other Heroes. A collection of sports poems. (In progress.)

Selected Shorter Publications: Fiction and Poetry:

• “Autumn at Woodland Hills Country Club” (poem). Cape Rock 15 (Summer 1980): 49.
• “Big Apple” (poem). Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 8 (Spring 1991): 92.
• “The Day Baseball Was Banned at Brice’s Crossroads” (story). Elysian Fields Quarterly 11 (Hot Stove Issue 1992): 23-28.
• “For Dal, on the Fourth of July” (poem). Spitball: The Literary Baseball Magazine no. 42 (Fall 1992): 44-45.
• “Groundskeepers: Opening Day” (poem). Elysian Fields Quarterly 12 (Opening Day Issue 1993): 42.
• “Mr. October” (poem). Elysian Fields Quarterly 13 (Winter 1994): 34.
• “On the Death of the Evansville University Basketball Team in a Plane Crash” (poem). Cape Rock 17 (Summer 1982): 40. Reprinted in Robert J. Higgs, Sports: A Reference Guide (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982): and David L. Vanderwerken and Spencer K.Wertz, eds., Sport Inside Out: Readings in Literature and Philosophy (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1985).
• “Pick and Roll” (poem). Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 8 (Spring 1991): 14.
• “Running: Cape Girardeau, November 1993” (poem). Cape Rock 30 (Spring 1995): 16-17.
• “Trading Deadline” (story). Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 8 (Spring 1991): 15-20.

Selected Shorter Publications: Nonfiction:

• (with Louis Daniel Brodsky) “The Far Side of Yoknapatawpha.” California 19 (October 1985): 72ff.
• “Before the Fall: The Theme of Innocence in Faulkner’s ‘That Evening Sun.’” Notes on Mississippi Writers 11 (Winter 1979): 86-94.
• “‘Carcassonne’: Faulkner’s Allegory of Art and the Artist.” Southern Review 15 (Spring 1979): 355-65.
• “Carcassonne in Mississippi: Faulkner’s Geography of the Imagination.” Faulkner and the Craft of Fiction. Eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. 148-71.
• “Faulkner’s Map of Yoknapatawpha: The End of Absalom, Absalom!” Teaching Faulkner 5 (Spring 1994): 4-5.
• “Homo Agonistes, or, William Faulkner as Sportswriter.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 13 (Spring 1996): 13-22.
• “James Street’s Look Away!: Source (and Non-Source) for William Faulkner.” American Notes and Queries 21 (May-June 1983): 141-43.
• “L. D. Brodsky Collection Rich in Signed, Original Source Materials.” Faulkner Newsletter and Yoknapatawpha Review 2 (October-December 1982): 1ff.
• “Literature Professor Reflects on Teaching and Scholarship.” In Publish or Perish: The Wrong Issue, by Leslie H. Cochran. Cape Girardeau, Missouri: StepUp Inc., 1992. 93-95.
• “‘Longer Than Anything’: Faulkner’s ‘Grand Design’ in Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner and the Artist. Eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 269-93.
• “Lucas Beauchamp, Ned Barnett, and William Faulkner’s 1940 Will.” Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 281-83.
• “‘Magic Realism’: or, The Split-Fingered Fastball of W. P. Kinsella.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 9 (Fall 1991): 1-10.
• “The Marble Faun: Chapter One of Faulkner’s Continuing Dialectic on Life and Art.” Publications of Missouri Philological Association 3 (1978): 80-90.
• “The 1965 Southern Literary Festival: A Microcosm of the Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of Mississippi History 53 (May 1991): 83-114.
• Review of Faulkner’s Apocrypha, by Joseph R. Urgo. South Atlantic Review 56:2 (1991): 160-63.
• Review of William Faulkner and Southern History, by Joel Williamson. Teaching Faulkner 2 (Winter 1993): 1-2.
• “Robert Penn Warren at the 1965 Southern Literary Festival.” Southern Literary Journal 22 (Spring 1990): 54-62.
• “‘Saying No to Death’: Toward William Faulkner’s Theory of Fiction.” “A Cosmos of My Own”: Faulkner and Yoknapawpha 1980. Eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981. 3-35.
• “Sports Imagery in Pat Conroy’s Novels.” Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature 11 (Fall 1993): 49-59.
• “The ‘Teaching Faulkner’ Sessions at the 1989 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.” Nebraska English and Language Arts Journal 36 (Fall-Winter 1990-1991): 7-15.
• “Understanding and Enhancing the Human Experience: The New University Studies Program at Southeast Missouri State University.” Perspectives: The Journal of the Association for General and Liberal Studies 18 (Spring 1988), 48-54. (Co-authored with other members of the University Studies Committee)
• “William Faulkner: The Brodsky Collection.” Missouri Library World 2 (Fall 1997): 2-6.
• (with Louis Daniel Brodsky) “Faulkner’s ‘L’Apres-Midi d’une Faun’: The Evolution of a Poem.” Studies in Bibliography 33 (1980): 254-63.

Bibliography

Internet Resources

Personal and Professional Web Sites:

• Robert W. Hamblin’s Personal Home Page. Includes more details about his education, teaching experience, honors and awards, areas of interest, and publications.
• Robert W. Hamblin. A description of Hamblin from the web site for the Center for Faulkner Studies, of which Hamblin is director.

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