Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run is a collection of articles and adventures chronicling a lifetime of journalistic storytelling by the late Dean Faulkner Wells and her husband, Lawrence Wells. Lawrence will read and sign copies of the book at 5:30 pm Friday, August 21, at Off Square Books in Oxford.
For every published article there is a backstory of behind-the-scenes adventures. Between 1980 and 2000, Dean Faulkner Wells and Lawrence Wells traveled coast to coast on magazine assignments. Backstory: A Literary Life on the Run reveals how unexpected events played a major role in each article. The collection of twenty-five articles begins with Dean’s interview with Willie “Suicide” Jones, her late father’s wing walker and fellow barnstormer, and ends with Dean’s fond recollection of a childhood Christmas at Rowan Oak, home of her uncle William Faulkner.
In between, the couple travels to Wounded Knee, scene of the tragic massacre of Big Foot and his band of Sioux, where Dean tears out a lock of hair and ties it to a fence in spiritual kinship. In Little Rock, the couple spends an evening with authors Charles Portis and Dee Brown. In San Francisco, they interview California jazz artists “Wild Mango” and singer/guitarist Joyce Cooling. They drive the Santa Fe Trail and tour Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo, Texas.
There are personal moments such as attending author Budd Schulberg’s wedding reception in Montauk, New York, and dining at the home of Jackson Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner. At a Memorial Day party on Long Island, film star Lauren Bacall tells Dean, “Hey, you sound more like me than me.” In Daphne, Alabama, Dean visits her longtime friend Peets Buffett, mother of Jimmy Buffett. In a Louisiana swamp, Larry has trouble finding an alligator to photograph until Dean points to a gator dozing at his feet. In Las Vegas, Dean’s addiction to slot machines leads to a domestic squabble. Ultimately, Backstory reveals a marriage of mind and spirit.
Dean Faulkner Wells (1936–2011) was the niece and ward of William Faulkner and the daughter of Dean Swift Faulkner, William’s youngest brother, who was killed in a plane crash before his daughter was born. Dean was educated at the University of Mississippi and the University of Geneva, Switzerland. In her first book, The Ghosts of Rowan Oak, she recounted her uncle William’s ghost stories. She edited The Great American Writers’ Cookbook. Her articles have been published in The Paris Review, Parade, Ladies Home Journal, Southern Living, and other magazines. She co-founded with her husband, Lawrence Wells, the Faux Faulkner parody contest, and edited The Best of Bad Faulkner (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich). Her autobiography, Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi, was published by Crown in March, 2011.
Lawrence Wells is the author of three historical novels: Rommel and the Rebel, Let the Band Play Dixie, and Fair Youth, a finalist for the 2024 Hawthorne Fiction Prize. Wells was awarded the 2014 Faulkner-Wisdom gold medal for narrative non-fiction at New Orleans’ Words and Music Festival. He scripted a 1994 Emmy-winning Mississippi Public Broadcasting documentary, Return to the River, narrated by James Earl Jones. Wells was a frequent contributor to The New York Times syndicate. His autobiographies, In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir (2020) and Ghostwriter: Shakespeare, Literary Landmines, and An Eccentric Patron’s Royal Obsession (2024), were published by University Press of Mississippi.
About the Author
