William Faulkner (1897 - 1962) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose work is set largely in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for his own corner of the American South. [1] Using stream of consciousness, shifting narrators and fractured chronology, he produced a body of fiction that ranks among the most technically ambitious in American literature. [3] He received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949 and two Pulitzer Prizes. [2]
Early life
Faulkner was born on 25 September 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, into a family with deep roots in the state, and grew up in nearby Oxford, where he spent most of his life. He left school without graduating and read widely on his own instead. He later added the letter "u" to the family surname Falkner. [1]
Rejected by the United States military as too short, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Canada in 1918 but the war ended before he completed flight training. He returned to Oxford, took courses as a special student at the University of Mississippi, worked briefly as the university's postmaster, and published a volume of verse before turning to prose. A stay in New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him, produced his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in 1926. [3]
The Yoknapatawpha novels
With Sartoris in 1929 Faulkner began writing about an invented Mississippi county he called Yoknapatawpha, whose families, land and racial history he would trace across more than a dozen books. The Sound and the Fury, published the same year, tells the decline of the Compson family through four narrators, one of them an intellectually disabled man, in prose that abandons conventional chronology. [1]
As I Lay Dying (1930) recounts a family's journey to bury their mother in fifteen speaking voices. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) take up questions of racial identity, inheritance and the legacy of slavery, while Sanctuary (1931) brought him his first commercial success. Later works include the Snopes trilogy beginning with The Hamlet and the linked stories of Go Down, Moses. [3]
Hollywood and recognition
For much of the 1930s and 1940s his novels sold modestly, and he supported himself with screenwriting in Hollywood, chiefly for the director Howard Hawks, contributing to films including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. Critical revaluation after the Second World War, helped by Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner, restored his standing. [1]
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1949, receiving it in Stockholm in 1950. His acceptance speech, which declared that humanity would not merely endure but prevail, became one of the most quoted statements on the writer's purpose. [2] He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Fable and again, posthumously, for The Reivers, as well as two National Book Awards, the O. Henry Award, the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and appointment as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. [1]
Later life and legacy
In his final years Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia and travelled abroad on cultural missions for the United States government. He struggled for much of his life with alcohol. He died of a heart attack at Byhalia, Mississippi, on 6 July 1962 and is buried in Oxford. [3]
His influence extends to writers across the Americas and beyond, among them Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy, and his experiments with narrative form remain a standard reference point in modern fiction. [1]
