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