Daniel Spoth

“Ah, Faulkner,” says Daniel Spoth, a wide smile stretching across his face. “Now we’re talkin’.”

“He’s the greatest of them all,” he says of the famously difficult-to-read novelist. “It took me years to even figure out what his books were about. But good literature should always be difficult, unsettling reading.”

Spoth grew up in a cabin in tiny Palmer, Alaska — “famous for enormous cabbages and very little else.” As a youth he escaped into reading. He couldn’t wait to leave his small-town environment to attend Reed. He embraced everything about the college, gladly trading the Alaska State Fair for Renn Fayre. He stayed up all night discussing books, played midnight croquet, and read and read and read.

On the October anniversary of the Russian Revolution’s storming of the Czar’s winter palace in St. Petersburg, he helped lead more than 100 students dressed in peasant clothes in a storming of Eliot Hall.

“We hung a big Soviet flag from the balcony and threw chunks of bread down to the teeming masses. All done in the pouring rain,” he says. “That’s the sort of thing I was doing freshman year.”

He studied Russian, moving into the Russian House and becoming its “movie czar,” responsible for screening movies and providing running translations for neophytes. He made a point of earning the license to operate the college’s nuclear reactor, just because he knew he’d never get another opportunity like it.

“Nuclear physics is sort of half an extracurricular activity and half an unorthodox hobby for me,” he says.

And then there’s literature. He reads widely, from William Wordsworth to William Carlos Williams.

And, of course, William Faulkner. He also reads other authors not named William. Spoth compensates for Reed’s lack of a resident Faulkner authority by cobbling together expertise from various professors and seizing the initiative to attend the University of Mississippi’s Faulkner Conference.

“You could make Faulkner jokes and everybody would laugh,” he remembers fondly.

The English major is writing his senior thesis on Faulkner, examining the writer’s place in the literary canon. He hopes to visit Russia to study what the Soviets thought of Faulkner. A Ph.D. is in his future.

“I’m doomed to read Faulkner,” he sighs happily.

Spoth spent much of his Reed years trying to understand what Faulkner was trying to say. He succeeded to some degree, as much as most people can with Faulkner. But what he really discovered was his own voice.

“All my life I haven’t really known what I wanted to say,” he says. “After four years at Reed, I’ve developed very strong opinions. It sounds hokey, but I have a stronger sense of my place in the world.”