Regina Fadiman; Scholar Wrote About Faulkner’s Works

Regina K. Fadiman, 82, literary critic and expert on the work of William Faulkner, died Sunday in her Los Angeles home of cancer.

Fadiman’s UCLA doctoral thesis “William Faulkner’s Light in August: Sources and Revisions” was published by the University Press of Virginia in 1975 and is still considered a seminal work of Faulkner criticism. She followed that in 1978 with publication of “Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust: Novel Into Film.”

The scholar was considered particularly adept at explaining how Faulkner transformed life’s raw materials into fiction and the difficulty of translating his powerful fiction to film.

Married to studio executive William Fadiman, she co-edited the Quarterly Review of Film Studies and helped endow the Shakespeare Festival at Cal Poly Pomona.