She shares her memories.
From a piece in the Reader's Almanac...
Earlier this month Dean Faulkner Wells, the last living relative with firsthand memories of William Faulkner, published her deliciously anecdote-filled memoir, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi. Wells is the daughter of Dean, the youngest of the four Faulkner brothers.
The dramatic event that governed her life occurred before she was even born:
The best and worst thing that could have happened to me took place on November 10, 1935, four months before I was born, when my father, a barnstorming pilot, was killed in a plane crash at the age of twenty-eight. The best, because it placed me at the center of the Faulkner family; the worst, because I would never know my father.
The oldest of the brothers, William felt tremendous guilt and responsibility for Dean’s death. A pilot himself, he had encouraged his brother to fly, paid for his lessons, and gave him his own plane, a Waco C cabin cruiser. As his niece writes, “It was as if William made a vow to Dean that November afternoon when he saw his unrecognizable body in the wreckage of the plane: He would tend to me in Dean’s place.” She grew up calling her uncle “Pappy” and Faulkner became her legal guardian and paid for her education and her wedding.
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