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William Faulkner
(1897-1962) The eldest of the four sons of Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner
Born in New Albany, Mississippi,
Faulkner soon moved with his parents to nearby Ripley and then to the town of Oxford, the seat of Lafayette county, where his father later became business manager of the University of Mississippi. William Faulkner
In Oxford he experienced the
characteristic open-air upbringing of a Southern white youth of middle- class parents: he had a pony to ride and was introduced to guns and hunting. A reluctant student, he left high school without graduating but devoted himself to “undirected reading,” William Faulkner In July 1918, impelled by dreams of martial glory and by despair at a broken love affair, Faulkner joined the British Royal Air Force (RAF) as a cadet pilot under training in Canada. After returning home, he enrolled for a few university courses, published poems and drawings in campus newspapers
After working in a New York bookstore for three
months in the fall of 1921, he returned to Oxford and ran the university post office there with notorious laxness until forced to resign. In 1924 Phil Stone’s financial assistance enabled him to publish The Marble Faun, a pastoral verse- Novels His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), given a Southern though not a Mississippian setting, was an impressive achievement, stylistically ambitious and strongly evocative of the sense of alienation experienced by soldiers returning from World War I to a civilian world of which they seemed no longer a part.
A second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), launched a satirical attack
on the New Orleans literary scene, including identifiable individuals, and can perhaps best be read as a declaration of artistic independence.
None of his short stories was accepted, however, and he was
especially shaken by his difficulty in finding a publisher for Flags in the Dust (published posthumously, 1973), a long, leisurely novel, drawing extensively on local observation and his own family history. When the novel eventually did appear, severely truncated, as Sartoris in 1929, it created in print for Influences Influenced by: Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), French novelist and playwright Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), English novelist Herman Melville (1819-1891), American novelist, short story writer, and poet Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), Polish-British novelist and short story writer James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), American novelist and short story writer The Sound and the Fury (1929) Faulkner had meanwhile “written [his] guts” into the more technically sophisticated The Sound and the Fury, believing that he was fated to remain permanently unpublished and need therefore make no concessions to the cautious commercialism of the literary marketplace. The novel did find a publisher, despite the difficulties it posed for its readers, and from the moment of its appearance in October 1929 Faulkner drove confidently forward as a writer, engaging always with new themes, new areas of experience, and, above all, new technical challenges. The Sound and the Fury The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first major novel, he combined a Yoknapatawpha setting with radical technical experimentation. In successive “ stream-of-consciousness” monologues the three brothers of Candace (Caddy) Compson—Benjy the idiot, Quentin the disturbed Harvard undergraduate, and Jason the embittered local businessman—expose their differing obsessions with their sister and their loveless relationships with their parents. A fourth section, narrated as if authorially, provides new perspectives on some of the central characters, including Dilsey, the Compsons’ Black servant, and moves toward a powerful yet essentially unresolved conclusion. Faulkner’s next novel, the brilliant tragicomedy called As I Lay Dying (1930), is centred upon the conflicts within the “poor white” Bundren family
Faulkner’s name was beginning to be known in the
early 1930s, and he was able to place short stories even in such popular—and well-paying—magazines as Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post
Faulkner produced in 1932 another long and powerful
novel. Complexly structured and involving several major characters. Light in August revolves primarily upon the contrasted careers of Lena Grove, a pregnant young countrywoman serenely in pursuit of In Absalom, Absalom! (1936) Thomas Sutpen arrives in Jefferson from “nowhere,” ruthlessly carves a large plantation out of the Mississippi wilderness, fights valiantly in the Civil War in defense of his adopted society, but is ultimately destroyed by his inhumanity toward those whom he has used and cast aside in the obsessive pursuit of his grandiose dynastic “design.”
The novel The Wild Palms (1939) was again technically
adventurous, with two distinct yet thematically counterpointed narratives alternating, chapter by chapter, throughout.
But Faulkner was beginning to return to the Yoknapatawpha
County material he had first imagined in the 1920s and subsequently exploited in short-story form. The Unvanquished (1938) was relatively conventional, but The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of the long-uncompleted “Snopes” trilogy, emerged as a work of extraordinary stylistic In 1942 appeared Go Down, Moses, yet another major work, in which an intense exploration of the linked themes of racial, sexual, and environmental exploitation is conducted largely in terms of the complex interactions between the “white” and “Black” branches of the plantation-owning McCaslin family
In Intruder in the Dust (1948), Lucas Beauchamp, reappearing
from Go Down, Moses, is proved innocent of murder, and thus saved from lynching, only by the persistent efforts of a young
Faulkner’s American reputation—which had always lagged well
behind his reputation in Europe—was boosted by The Portable Faulkner (1946), an anthology skillfully edited by Malcolm Cowley white boy. Racial issues were again confronted Faulkner’s Collected Stories (1950), impressive in both quantity and quality, was also well received, and later in 1950 the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature catapulted the author instantly to the peak of world fame
Faulkner in 1957 and 1958 readily accepted semester-long
appointments as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
The quality of Faulkner’s writing is often said to have declined in
the wake of the Nobel Prize.
But the central sections of Requiem for a Nun (1951) are
challengingly set out in dramatic form, and A Fable (1954), a long, densely written, and complexly structured novel about World War I, demands attention as the work in which Faulkner made by far his greatest investment of time, effort, and In The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) Faulkner not only brought the “Snopes” trilogy to its conclusion, carrying his Yoknapatawpha narrative to beyond the end of World War II, but subtly varied the management of narrative point of view.
Finally, in June 1962 Faulkner published yet another distinctive
novel, the genial, nostalgic comedy of male maturation he called The Reivers and appropriately subtitled “A Reminiscence.” A month later he was dead, of a heart attack, at the age of 64, his health undermined by his drinking and by too many falls from horses too big for him. Overview