Faces of Southeast Missouri: Dr. Robert Hamblin

Dr. Robert Hamblin has written and published more than 70 books, and his work has been translated into Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and French. Now, he can add Persian to that list.

Hamblin found out about the Persian translation of “Myself and the World,” a biography he wrote about Southern writer William Fulkner, in September through a Facebook post highlighting a review of the translation from the Tehran Times. The text, he says, was pirated, and the press the book is published through is working to get the copyright details sorted out.

Still, not many writers in the English language can add “Persian translation” to their resume, and Hamblin recognizes that.

“I’m pleased it’s been published, but I wish they hadn’t stolen it,” Hamblin says, smiling. “It’s one of the best reviews of a book I ever got.”

Hamblin, who has written 38 books of poetry, 22 works about Faulkner, seven novels, four memoirs, three biographies and a collection of essays, says he never wanted to be a specialist. Yet, he has been an influential scholar in the field of Faulkner and was key in acquiring the collection housed at Southeast Missouri State University’s Faulkner Center.

Growing up in Mississippi 70 miles from Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford, Miss., Hamblin didn’t discover Faulkner until college, when he read the novel “As I Lay Dying” in a Southern literature class. Hamblin recalls being impressed by the novel because of the way Faulkner tells the story through 15 narrators; Hamblin had never read anything like it. He went on to study Faulkner in graduate school at Ole Miss, moving to Oxford, Miss., two months after Faulkner’s death and getting to learn about Faulkner from people who had known him.

He also wrote his PhD dissertation on Faulkner. In 1978, a teacher in his night class where they were reading a novel by Faulkner asked if he’d met L.D. Brodsky, a Faulkner collector from St. Louis who lived in Farmington, Mo. Hamblin wrote to Brodsky, and a month later, received an invitation to come and see his collection in Farmington.

Hamblin went.

“I had studied Faulkner for 20 years at that time, and I knew I was looking at wills, letters, photographs — I was looking at things that no Faulkner scholar had ever seen,” Hamblin says.

The meeting grew into a decades-long friendship between Hamblin and Brodsky: Brodsky collected, and Hamblin wrote about the collection. In 1988, after Brodsky had discussions about placing the collection with Ole Miss, Yale University and Washington University, he offered his collection to Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO) where Hamblin taught, and the university paid $500,000 for the collection, to be paid over 20 years with interest, a total of $1 million. Now, the collection has more than doubled in size and is worth $15 to 20 million.

Thus began the Faulkner Center, which debuted its three-month exhibit in 1989, garnering attention from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the St. Louis Post Dispatch. Throughout the next 10 years, Hamblin and Brodsky published eight books and numerous articles in journals, as well as created exhibits across the country.

This helped Southeast Missouri State University become one of the four major Faulkner centers of study in the United States, along with the University of Virginia, Ole Miss and the University of Texas. SEMO has many of Faulkner’s movie scripts, early poetry, and unpublished letters and photographs; scholars from around the world come to study at the center, and throughout the years, the center has hosted conferences, public lectures and exhibits.

Hamblin still volunteers as a consultant at the Faulkner Center. Recently, he wrote a book of poems based on Faulkner’s characters, books and personal life.

He says he is proud of it because it combines two of his favorite interests: Faulkner and poetry. In retirement, Hamblin says he writes and posts a poem on Facebook each day. He also has a couple of essays about Faulkner publishing soon. He says he’s always been more interested in the way Faulkner tells a story than in the story he tells; however, Faulkner’s theme is change, and Hamblin says America can continue to learn from Faulkner’s words.