The sleepy little hamlet of New Albany, Mississippi, gave
America one of its greatest writers when, on September 25, 1897, novelist
William Faulkner was born. Best known for his Yoknapatawpha
cycle, a human comedy of the American South that began in 1929
with Sartoris/Flags in the Dust and finished with The Mansion
Faulkner--who had changed the spelling of his last name from
Falkner upon publishing his
first book of poetry in 1924--was the oldest of four sons born to Murray
Charles and Maud Butler Falkner. While he was still a child,
the family settled in Oxford in northern Mississippi. Faulkner
lived most of his life in the town, which he called "a little postage stamp
of native soil," a village of unpaved streets with a population of 1500
people. When he reached the age of 13, he began to
write poetry. He also enjoyed sports and played quarterback at Oxford High School until he had
has nose broken. He dropped out of school after receiving a "D" in
English before he received his diploma
to go to work in his grandfather's bank.
As war loomed across the horizon, Faulkner tried enlisting in the army
but was turned away for being too short. He joined the Royal
Canadian Air Force and received his basic training in Toronto. He
served with the RAF in World War I but did not see any action, which didn't
stop him from telling people later that he had been shot down over France.
"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be
completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It
anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until
then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security,
happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his
mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any
number of old ladies." - from Writers at Work: The Paris Review
After the war, Faulkner briefly studied literature at the University of
Mississippi. He continued writing poetry and also drew
cartoons for the university's humor magazine, The Scream. The
magazine's editor recalled, "I liked the cartoons better than the poetry."
In 1920, Faulkner left the university without receiving a degree and moved
to New York City, where he worked as a clerk in a bookstore. After that, he
returned to Oxford where he supported himself as postmaster at the
University of Mississippi until he was fired for reading on the job.
He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write
fiction rather than poetry. Faulkner took him up on the suggestion.
after publishing his first novel, Soldier's Pay, about
a young soldier returning from the war physically and psychologically
disabled, he followed up with Mosquitoes, a satirical account
of the Bohemian life of the poets and intellectuals living in New Orleans.
The author's early writing shows the influence of Keats, Tennyson,
and the literature of the 1890s.
Faulkner wrote Sartoris (1929), the first of fifteen novels set in
Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi loosely patterned
after Lafayette County. It was a Chickasaw Indian word that meant
"water passes slowly through flatlands." Sartoris was later reissued
under the title, Flags in the Dust (1973). The Yoknapatawpha
novels spanned the decades of the South's post-Civil War economic decline
through the Great Depression. They are filled with racism, class
distinction, and the
vagaries of the southern family, all recurring Faulknerian themes. Along the way, the author used various writing styles. The narrative
varies from the traditional storytelling of Light in August and a
series of vignette-like snapshots in As I Lay Dying to the collage of
The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, which is often
considered Faulkner's masterpiece. It records a range of voices and
varying points-of-view, all trying to unravel the mysteries of Thomas
Sutpen's violent life.
He wrote all of his books in longhand, often struggling with words and
definitions. He didn't own a dictionary. Often, he would make up
his own words to suit the moment, combine two words into one, or turn nouns
into verbs and vice versa. If he couldn't spell something, he would
walk down to the local drugstore and ask someone there to look it up for
him. Sometimes, he would stop people on the street and ask them for
the meaning of a word. "I'm looking for a word. It means the
same as 'running fast' but I don't want to use 'running fast.'"
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood
sweetheart, who had recently been divorced. The following year, the
young couple purchased a traditional Southern pillared house in Oxford, which he named
Rowan Oak. It was typically ornate, with immaculate grounds and mature
trees. Architecture was important to the author. He restored
Rowan Oak to its previous glory, named some of his books after various buildings (The Mansion),
and depicted them in his writings with great care and deliberation:
"It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated
with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome
style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street."
- from A Rose for Emily
With The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first master work, Faulkner
gained recognition as a serious writer. He followed that up with As I Lay
Dying the following year, while still working at an electrical power station
in a nightshift job. The book follows the illness, death, and burial
of Addie Bundren. Her dying wish is to be buried in her home town.
The family struggles through flood and fire to carry her coffin to the
graveyard in Jefferson, Mississippi. The journey becomes Addie's
curse: "Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and
selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever."
The following year saw the publication of Sanctuary (1931), which,
according to the author, was "deliberately conceived to make money."
In it, a young woman is raped by a murderer. She finds sanctuary in a
brothel. Faulkner experimented with various
methods of narration, using page-long sentences and forcing the reader to
hold in mind details and phrases that are meaningful only at the end of the
One of Faulkner's primary themes is the abuse of blacks by
the Southern whites. Because his novels treat the decay and anguish of the
South following the Civil War, they are rich in violent and sordid events.
But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that
celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life.
To earn money, Faulkner worked in Hollywood off and on for
two decades, contributing to screenplays such as Today We Live (1933)
and Land of the Pharaos (1955). His own stories were considered
too wild for Hollywood during the Hays Code of Decency days, dealing, as they did,
with rape, incest, suicide, and more. Between scriptwriting,
Faulkner published several novels. Pylon (1934), the story of four
adults and a child who travel from one air show to another, Absalom,
Absalom!, The Wild Palms (1939),
a story of the Snopes family in which the character McCord is based on
Ernest Hemingway and parallels that author's A Farwell to Arms, and
Go Down Moses and Other Stories (1942), containing "The Bear," one of his
best short fiction pieces.
By 1945, with Faulkner's novels out of print,
the author again turned to Hollywood and began writing scripts, mostly for
director Howard Hawks, who had read Faulkner's first novel and recommended
it to his friends. Hawks' biographer Todd McCarthy wrote," "Just a
year apart in age, with Hawks the senior, both were reserved to the point of
non-communicativemess. Nunnally Johnson was astonished by the sight of
the two of them just sitting together not saying a word. When they did
talk, they did so slowly, in a drawling manner."
Faulkner worked with Hawks, among others,
on the film The
Big Sleep (1946), based on Raymond Chandler's novel and starring
Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. He also worked with him on To Have and
Have Not (1944), based freely on Ernest Hemingway's novel.
Hemingway had just turned down Hawks' offer to work on the screenplay of his own
book, to which Hawks replied, "I'll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than
you can anyway."
In 1946, Faulkner underwent a second period of success with the
publication of The Portable Faulkner. Three years later, he
received the Nobel Prize for Peace in the category of literature. But
by then, the author had done some serious damage to his health by hard
drinking. His wife's drug addiction and declining health only added to
a stressful family situation. "I will always believe that my first
responsibility is to the artist, the work," he wrote in a letter; '"it is
terrible that my wife does not realize or at least accept that."
His stints in Hollywood didn't do much to strengthen his family life,
Securely away from home, he carried on a series of affairs, from secretive
One of his paramours, script-girl Meta Carpenter Wilde, wrote a book about
their relationship. Meanwhile, Faulkner continued writing novels. In 1951,
he published Requiem for a Nun, followed three
years later by A Fable, which was poorly received. His The
Town in 1957 and The Mansion continued the saga of the Snopes
His last book, The Reivers (1962), placed the author back in the
childhood setting he knew and loved so well from Sanctuary. It
was to be a final reuinion: on June 17 of that year, Faulkner was thrown
from a horse. He died of a coronary occlusion three weeks later.
In his obituary, The New York Times (July 7, 1962) cited his
critics and stated that "Mr. Faulkner's writings showed an obsession with
murder, rape, incest, suicide, greed and general depravity that did not
exist anywhere but in the author's mind."
How wrong that assessment has turned out to be.
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