William Faulkner visiting the editorial staff of the weekly magazine Epoca. Italian journalists Dino Falconi, Gianni Baldi, Enzo Biagi, Alfredo Panicucci, Mino Monicelli and Tommaso Giglio and Italian writer Alfonso Gatto are with him. Milan
(A group of soldiers travel by train across the United Sta...)
A group of soldiers travel by train across the United States in the aftermath of the First World War. One of them is horribly scarred, blind and almost entirely mute. Moved by his condition, a few civilian fellow travellers decided to see him home to Georgia, to a family who believed him dead, and a fiancée who grew tired of waiting. Faulkner’s first novel deals powerfully with lives blighted by war.
(A fascinating glimpse of the author as a young artist, Fa...)
A fascinating glimpse of the author as a young artist, Faulkner’s sophomore novel, Mosquitoes (1927), introduces us to a colorful band of passengers on a boating excursion from New Orleans. This engaging, high-spirited tale—which Faulkner wrote “for the sake of writing because it was fun”—provides a delightful accompaniment to his canonical works.
(The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson fami...)
The Sound and the Fury is the tragedy of the Compson family, featuring some of the most memorable characters in literature: beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
(As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bun...)
As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members—including Addie herself—as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.
(Psychologically astute and wonderfully poetic, Sanctuary ...)
Psychologically astute and wonderfully poetic, Sanctuary is a powerful novel examining the nature of true evil, through the prisms of mythology, local lore, and hard-boiled detective fiction. This is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.
(Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in th...)
Light in August, a novel about hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, who is plagued by visions of Confederate horsemen; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
(Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air sho...)
Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New Valois. An unnamed reporter for a local newspaper tries to understand a very modern ménage a trois of flyers on the brainstorming circuit. These characters, Faulkner said, "were a fantastic and bizarre phenomenon on the face of the contemporary scene. That is, there was really no place for them in the culture, in the economy, yet they were there, at that time, and everyone knew that they wouldn’t last very long, which they didn’t. That they were outside the range of God, not only of respectability, of love, but of God too."
(Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpe...)
Absalom, Absalom! is Faulkner’s epic tale of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who comes to Jefferson, Mississippi, in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."
(The Unvanquished is a 1938 novel by the American author W...)
The Unvanquished is a 1938 novel by the American author William Faulkner, set in Yoknapatawpha County. It tells the story of the Sartoris family, who first appeared in the novel Sartoris. The Unvanquished takes place before that story, and is set during the American Civil War.
(In The Wild Palms, subsequently titled If I Forget Thee, ...)
In The Wild Palms, subsequently titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, William Faulkner interweaves two stories. In the story Wild Palms, it’s New Orleans 1937. A man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of illicit passion, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In the story Old Man, the setting is Mississippi ten years earlier where a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his own chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman.
("Barn Burning" is a short story by the American author Wi...)
"Barn Burning" is a short story by the American author William Faulkner which first appeared in Harper's in June 1939 and has since been widely anthologized. The story deals with class conflicts, the influence of fathers, and vengeance as viewed through the third-person perspective of a young, impressionable child.
(The Hamlet is both an ironic take on classical tragedy an...)
The Hamlet is both an ironic take on classical tragedy and a mordant commentary on the grand pretensions of the antebellum South and the depths of its decay in the aftermath of war and Reconstruction. It tells of the advent and the rise of the Snopes family in Frenchman’s Bend, a small town built on the ruins of a once-stately plantation. Flem Snopes—wily, energetic, a man of shady origins—quickly comes to dominate the town and its people with his cunning and guile.
(Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories,...)
Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.
(The chronicle of an elderly black farmer arrested for the...)
The chronicle of an elderly black farmer arrested for the murder of a white man and under threat from the lynch mob. This is a characteristically Faulknerian tale of dark omen, its sole ray of hope the character of the young white boy who repays an old favour by proving the innocence of the man who once saved him from drowning in an icy creek.
(Big Woods is a collection of Faulkner's best hunting stor...)
Big Woods is a collection of Faulkner's best hunting stories. An avid hunter as well as one of America's greatest writers, Faulkner spent many days hunting in the big woods near Oxford, Mississippi.Included here is his most famous hunting story, "The Bear", as well as "The Old People", "A Bear Hunt", and "Race at Morning".
(One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a pi...)
One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey, for which they are all ill-equipped, that ends at Miss Reba's bordello in Memphis. From there a series of wild misadventures ensues--invoving horse smuggling, trainmen, sheriffs' deputies, and jail.
(The complete text, published for the first time in 1973, ...)
The complete text, published for the first time in 1973, of Faulkner’s third novel, written when he was twenty-nine, which appeared, with his reluctant consent, in a much cut version in 1929 as Sartoris.
William Faulkner was a major American 20th-century novelist, who chronicled the decline and decay of the aristocratic South with an imaginative power and psychological depth that transcend mere regionalism. In 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and his best-known novels are "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying".
Background
William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi to Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. William was the oldest of four brothers Murry Charles "Jack" Falkner, author John Faulkner, and Dean Swift Falkner.
Both parents came from wealthy families reduced to genteel poverty by the Civil War. A great-grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (as the family spelled its name), had authored The White Rose of Memphis, a popular success of 1806. William's father owned a hardware store and livery stable in Oxford and later became the business manager of the state university.
Education
William attended public school only fitfully after the fifth grade; he never graduated from high school. In 1919 Faulkner enrolled at the University of Mississippi as a special student but left the next year for New York City.
In 1918, after the U.S. Army rejected him for being underweight and too short (5 feet 5 inches), Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Air Force. During his brief service in World War I, he suffered a leg injury in a plane accident. In 1918 he was demobilized and made an honorary second lieutenant.
After the war he returned to Oxford, Mississippi, and alternated study at the university with a variety of odd jobs around town. He was a journeyman carpenter, house painter, fireman, night watchman, and postmaster (a job which he lost because of inattention to duty). In 1925 he and a friend made a walking tour of Europe, returning home in 1926.
During the early 1920s Faulkner wrote poetry and fiction. In the volume of verse The Marble Faun (1922), a printer's error allegedly introduced the "u" into the author's name, which he decided to retain. The money for another book of poems, The Green Bough (1933), was supplied by a lawyer friend, Philip Stone, on whom the lawyer in Faulkner's later fiction is modeled. Faulkner's poetry shows the poet's taste for language but lacks stylistic discipline.
Faulkner is considered a fine practitioner of the short-story form, and some of his stories, such as "A Rose for Emily," are widely anthologized. His collections - These Thirteen (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), and Knight's Gambit (1949) - deal with themes similar to those in his novels and include many of the same characters.
During the years 1926-1930 Faulkner published a series of distinguished novels. Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927) precede Sartoris (1927), Faulkner's first important work, in which he begins his Yoknapatawpha saga. Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury was published in 1929 and was followed by As I Lay Dying (1930). In 1931 the success of Sanctuary, written expressly to make money, freed him of financial worries.
By 1932, Faulkner was in need of money. He asked Wasson to sell the serialization rights for his newly completed novel, Light in August (1932), to a magazine for $5, 000, but none accepted the offer. Then MGM Studios offered Faulkner work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Faulkner would continue to find reliable work as a screenwriter from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Faulkner continued to work on his novels. The novel of 1935, Pylon, is considered to be Faulkner's weakest novels and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is an extremely complex novel. Two minor novels, The Unvanquished (1938) and The Wild Palms (1939), were followed by an uneven but intriguing satire of the Snopes clan, The Hamlet (1940).
Intruder in the Dust (1948) takes a liberal view of southern race relations. A Fable (1954) is a very poor parable of Christ and Judas. The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962), a trilogy that is part of the Yoknapatawpha saga, are generally regarded as minor works.
It was not until after World War II that Faulkner received critical acclaim. French critics recognized his power first; André Malraux wrote an appreciative preface to Sanctuary, and Jean Paul Sartre wrote a long critical essay on Faulkner. The turning point for Faulkner's reputation came in 1946, when Malcolm Cowley published the influential The Portable Faulkner.
The groundswell of praise for Faulkner's work culminated in a 1950 Nobel Prize for literature. His 1955 lecture tour of Japan is recorded in Faulkner at Nagano (1956). In 1957-1958 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia; his dialogues with students make up Faulkner in the University (1959). William Faulkner: Essays, Speeches and Public Letters (1965) and The Faulkner-Cowley File (1966) offer further insights into the man.
Faulkner was badly injured in a horse-riding accident in 1959. On June 17, 1962, he once again suffered a serious injury in a fall from his horse, which led to thrombosis. He died of a thrombosis-related heart attack, aged 64, on July 6, 1962, at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
William Faulkner was a major American 20th-century novelist. In 1949 he received Nobel Prize in Literature, which made him the only Mississippi-born Nobel winner. His works A Fable and The Reivers won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury was ranked sixth on the list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library. William's As I Lay Dying, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! also appeared on similar lists.
Faulkner also won the U.S. National Book Award twice, in 1951 and in 1955. In 1946 he became one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award and placed second to Rhea Galati. In his honor, the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp.
Faulkner created an impressive literary legacy and remains a revered writer of the rural American South, having expertly captured the immense complexities of both the region's beauty and its dark past.
Inspired by the concept, given to him by the American writer Sherwood Anderson, who told the young author to write about his native region of Mississippi (a place that Faulkner surely knew better than northern France), Faulkner began writing about the places and people of his childhood, developing a great many colorful characters based on real people he had grown up with or heard about, including his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner.
Faulkner became known for his faithful and accurate dictation of Southern speech. He also boldly illuminated social issues that many American writers left in the dark, including slavery, the "good old boys" club and Southern aristocracy.
Quotations:
"Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him."
"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth."
"You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore."
"The saddest thing about love, Joe, is that not only the love cannot last forever, but even the heartbreak is soon forgotten."
"Perhaps they were right putting love into books. Perhaps it could not live anywhere else."
"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home."
"I'm bad and I'm going to hell, and I don't care. I'd rather be in hell than anywhere where you are."
"If a story is in you, it has to come out."
"Dreams have only one owner at a time. That's why dreamers are lonely."
"You can't beat women anyhow and that if you are wise or dislike trouble and uproar you don't even try to."
"The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself"
"Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be."
"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
"A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others."
"War and drink are the two things man is never too poor to buy."
"A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…."
Personality
Faulkner was a quiet, dapper, courteous man, mustachioed and sharp-eyed. He steadfastly refused the role of celebrity: he permitted no prying into his private life and rarely granted interviews.
In his casual life, he enjoyed drinking and hunting in a company of friends.
Physical Characteristics:
In his youth he was underweight and too short (5 feet 5 inches). During his brief service in World War I, he suffered a leg injury in a plane accident.
Quotes from others about the person
James Gould Cozzens: "Faulkner falsified life for dramatic effect. It's sentimentality disguised by the corncob."
Ernest Hemingway: "Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You're thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he's had his first one."
Interests
As a teenager, Faulkner was taken by drawing. He also greatly enjoyed reading and writing poetry.
Connections
Faulkner was married in 1929 to Estelle Oldham, and they lived together in Oxford until his death on July 6, 1962. Estelle became pregnant, and in January of 1931, she gave birth to a daughter, whom they named Alabama. Tragically, the premature baby lived for just over a week.
Despite his deep love for his wife, however, Faulkner had several extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks's secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter, later known as Meta Wilde. The affair was chronicled in her book A Loving Gentleman. Another, from 1949–53, was with a young writer, Joan Williams, who made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel, The Wintering.
Father:
Murry Cuthbert Falkner
(August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932)
Mother:
Maud Butler Faulkner
(November 27, 1871 – October 16, 1960)
Wife:
Estelle Oldham Faulkner
1897–1972
Brother:
Murry Charles Falkner
(June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975)
Brother:
John Faulkner
(September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963)
Brother:
Dean Swift Faulkner
(August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935)
Daughter:
Alabama Faulkner
1931–1931
Daughter:
Jill Faulkner Summers
1933–2008
Friend:
Howard Hawks
(May 30, 1896 – December 26, 1977)
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era.
In Hollywood Faulkner worked with Hawks, with whom he quickly developed a friendship, as they both enjoyed drinking and hunting.
William Faulkner: A Life through Novels
Despite the many works published about Faulkner, his life and career, it still remains a mystery how a poet of minor symbolist poems rooted in the history of the Deep South became one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century. Here, renowned critic André Bleikasten revisits Faulkner's biography through the author's literary imagination. Weaving together correspondence and archival research with the graceful literary analysis for which he is known, Bleikasten presents a multi-strand account of Faulkner's life in writing.
2017
Faulkner: A Biography
Originally published in 1974 as a two-volume edition and extensively updated and condensed in a 1991 reissue, Joseph Blotner's Faulkner: A Biography remains the quintessential resource on the Nobel laureate's life and work.
1974
Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner
In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein - a leading authority on the great novelist--targets Faulkner's embattled sense of self as central to both his life and his work. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history - with antebellum practices and racial division - take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before.
2009
One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner
Drawing on previously unavailable sources - including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner's daughter and lovers - Jay Parini has crafted a biography that delves into the mystery of this gifted and troubled writer. His Faulkner is an extremely talented, obsessive artist plagued by alcoholism and a bad marriage who somehow transcends his limitations. Parini weaves the tragedies and triumphs of Faulkner's life in with his novels, serving up a biography that's as engaging as it is insightful.
2004
William Faulkner: Lives and Legacies
In this newest volume in Oxford's Lives and Legacies series, Carolyn Porter, a leading authority on William Faulkner, offers an insightful account of Faulkner's life and work, with special focus on the breathtaking twelve-year period when he wrote some of the finest novels in American literature.
1959
William Faulkner, The Man and the Artist: A Biography
Based on Faulkner collections at two universities, a previously unexamined private collection, and interviews with Faulkner's associates, this biography profiles the often contradictory personality of the famed Southern author.
1987
William Faulkner, American Writer : A Biography
Illuminates how Faulkner's Southern heritage, his drinking, and his relations with women were woven into a single imaginative pattern that bodied forth the self-imposed myths about himself and inspired his fiction.
1989
William Faulkner and Southern History
William Faulkner and Southern History represents an unprecedented publishing event - an eminent historian writing on a major literary figure. By revealing the deep history behind the art of the South's most celebrated writer, Williamson evokes new insights and deeper understanding, providing anyone familiar with Faulkner's great novels with a host of connections between his work, his life, and his ancestry.
1993
William Faulkner: His Life and Work
In this highly acclaimed biography, David Minter draws upon a wealth of material, including the novelist's essays, interviews, published and unpublished letters, as well as his poems, stories, and novels, to illuminate the close relationship between the flawed life and the artistic achievement of one of twentieth-century America's most complex literary figures.
1980
Every Day by the Sun: A Memoir of the Faulkners of Mississippi
In Every Day by the Sun, Dean Faulkner Wells recounts the story of the Faulkners of Mississippi, whose legacy includes pioneers, noble and ignoble war veterans, three never-convicted murderers, the builder of the first railroad in north Mississippi, the founding president of a bank, an FBI agent, four pilots (all brothers), and a Nobel Prize winner, arguably the most important American novelist of the twentieth century. She also reveals wonderfully entertaining and intimate stories and anecdotes about her family - in particular her uncle William, or "Pappy," with whom she shared colorful, sometimes utterly frank, sometimes whimsical, conversations and experiences.
2011
William Faulkner: Overlook Illustrated Lives
An illustrated portrait of the early twentieth-century classic author offers insight into how his life in post-Reconstruction Mississippi informed his writing, his work as a Hollywood screenwriter, and the themes of divided loyalties, injustice, and brutality throughout his classic works.
