William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Falkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the eldest of four sons of Murry Falkner and Maud Butler Falkner. The family surname was originally spelled without a u; the writer later adopted the spelling Faulkner, reportedly after a printer inserted the extra letter ^[1]. When William was a small child the family moved first to Ripley and then, in 1902, to Oxford, the seat of Lafayette County and home of the University of Mississippi, where his father eventually worked as a business manager ^[2].

Family history pressed on him early. His great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, had been a Confederate officer, railroad builder, and popular novelist who was shot dead by a former business partner in 1889. The old colonel became a model for Colonel John Sartoris in his great-grandson's fiction, and the mix of ambition, violence, and decline in the family story fed the material of the later novels ^[1].

Faulkner was a bright but restless student. He read widely under the encouragement of his mother and of Phil Stone, an Oxford lawyer four years his senior who lent him books and championed his early poems. He never finished high school, dropping out in his final year, and his formal education afterward amounted to a few terms as a special student at the University of Mississippi between 1919 and 1920 ^[2]. In 1918, after being turned down by the United States Army partly because of his slight build, he enrolled as a cadet with the Royal Air Force in Canada. The First World War ended before he completed flight training, though he returned to Oxford wearing an officer's uniform and encouraging romantic stories about his service ^[1].

Faulkner's first ambitions were poetic. His earliest publication was a poem, L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune, printed in The New Republic in 1919, and his first book, The Marble Faun of 1924, was a collection of verse financed with help from Phil Stone ^[2]. During these apprentice years he drifted through odd jobs in Oxford, including a famously careless stint as university postmaster, a position he resigned in 1924 amid complaints about undelivered mail ^[1].

The decisive turn came in New Orleans in early 1925, where he fell in with the literary circle around the magazine The Double Dealer and met Sherwood Anderson, then one of the most admired writers in the country. Anderson urged him to write fiction about the Mississippi country he knew and helped him place his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, published in 1926 ^[3]. A second novel, Mosquitoes, a satire of the New Orleans art crowd, followed in 1927.

With his third book Faulkner found his lifelong subject. Flags in the Dust, published in cut form as Sartoris in 1929, introduced the imagined north Mississippi county he would soon name Yoknapatawpha, with its seat at Jefferson, a town closely modeled on Oxford ^[2]. That same year he published The Sound and the Fury, the story of the collapsing Compson family told through four narrators, including the mentally disabled Benjy. Its fractured chronology and stream of consciousness technique announced a major modernist talent, even though initial sales were small ^[3].

The years from 1929 to 1942 were among the most concentrated bursts of creativity in American letters, and they anchor any account of William Faulkner achievements. As I Lay Dying, written in 1929 while he worked night shifts at a university power plant and published in 1930, told the story of the poor Bundren family's journey to bury their mother through fifty nine short monologues spoken by fifteen narrators ^[3]. Sanctuary, a deliberately shocking crime novel published in 1931, brought him his first commercial success and notoriety ^[1].

Light in August appeared in 1932, weaving together the stories of the pregnant wanderer Lena Grove and the racially ambiguous outsider Joe Christmas. Absalom, Absalom!, published in 1936, reconstructed the rise and destruction of the planter Thomas Sutpen through layered, competing tellings, and many critics rank it his greatest single work ^[2]. Other books of the period include The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of his Snopes trilogy, and Go Down, Moses (1942), which contains the celebrated hunting story The Bear ^[3].

Recognition lagged behind achievement. By the mid 1940s most of his books were out of print in the United States, and his reputation was arguably higher in France, where writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Andre Malraux praised him, than at home. The Portable Faulkner, an anthology edited by Malcolm Cowley in 1946, helped revive American interest by presenting the Yoknapatawpha fiction as a single connected design ^[4]. In November 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, and his short acceptance speech in Stockholm, with its declaration that man will not merely endure but prevail, became one of the most quoted addresses in the history of the prize ^[5]. He later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for A Fable in 1955 and for The Reivers, awarded in 1963 after his death, along with two National Book Awards ^[2].

In June 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, his childhood sweetheart, shortly after her divorce from her first husband, Cornell Franklin. Estelle brought two children from that marriage, and in 1933 the couple had a daughter, Jill; an earlier daughter, Alabama, had died in infancy in 1931 ^[1]. In 1930 Faulkner bought a run down antebellum house on the edge of Oxford, named it Rowan Oak, and restored it himself. It remained his home for the rest of his life and is now a museum operated by the University of Mississippi ^[6].

The marriage was strained by money troubles, by Faulkner's periodic affairs, and by heavy drinking on both sides. Faulkner's alcoholism was severe and lifelong, marked by binges that sometimes required hospitalization, though he rarely drank while actually writing ^[1]. To support his household he sold short stories to magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and worked intermittently in Hollywood from 1932 into the 1950s, chiefly for MGM and Warner Bros. His screenwriting credits include work with director Howard Hawks on To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946) ^[7].

By temperament he was private and often gruff with journalists, preferring farming, horses, hunting, and sailing to literary society. He liked to describe himself as a farmer rather than a writer, and for decades he resisted efforts to make his personal life public ^[2].

The Nobel Prize changed Faulkner's circumstances and, to a degree, his role. Financially secure at last, he traveled abroad for the United States State Department in the 1950s, visiting countries including Japan, where his 1955 seminars at Nagano were later published ^[2]. He completed the Snopes trilogy with The Town in 1957 and The Mansion in 1959, and published Requiem for a Nun (1951) and the long allegorical war novel A Fable (1954), which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award ^[3].

During the same decade he spoke publicly, and often uncomfortably, about segregation in the South. He described himself as a moderate, urging white Southerners to accept integration while warning outsiders against forcing change too fast, a stance that drew criticism from both segregationists and civil rights advocates, particularly after a widely disputed 1956 interview ^[1].

From 1957 he served as writer in residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where recordings of his classroom sessions were preserved and later made available by the university ^[8]. His final novel, The Reivers, a comic reminiscence of a boyhood automobile escapade, appeared in June 1962. A fall from a horse that spring aggravated his declining health, and on July 6, 1962, he died of a heart attack at a sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi, at the age of 64. He was buried in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford ^[2].

Faulkner's standing has only grown since his death. Critics generally place him with the central modernists of the twentieth century, and his experiments with time, voice, and unreliable narration influenced writers far beyond the United States. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy are among the novelists who have acknowledged his example, and Latin American authors of the Boom generation frequently cited him as a master ^[4].

His invented county became a model for how a writer might build a complete fictional world. The map of Yoknapatawpha he drew for Absalom, Absalom!, labeled with himself as sole owner and proprietor, has become an emblem of that ambition ^[3]. Institutions keep the work alive in concrete ways: Rowan Oak draws visitors year round, the University of Mississippi has hosted the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference since 1974, and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, founded with his Nobel Prize money in mind and named partly in his honor, is a leading American book prize ^[6].

A William Faulkner biography is also a record of difficult questions his fiction forces readers to confront: slavery's long shadow, racial violence, family ruin, and the weight of the past on the present. His famous line from Requiem for a Nun, that the past is never dead and is not even past, is quoted so often precisely because his novels earned it. Among essential William Faulkner facts, perhaps the simplest is the most striking: from a town of a few thousand people he produced a body of work read on every continent ^[2].