A study of William Faulkner's final phase as a period in which he faced up to America's rigid protocols of racial ideology. This study argues that Faulkner's writings about racial matters interrogated rather than validated his racial beliefs and that, in the process of questioning his own ideology, his fictional forms extended his reach as an artist. After winning the Nobel Prize in 1950, Faulkner wrote what critics term ""his later novels."" These have been almost uniformly dismissed, with the prevailing view being that as he became a more public figure, his fiction became a platform rather t