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Biography (1897-1962)
Born at the close of the nineteenth century, William Faulkner is considered by many to be one of the most important and influential novelists of the twentieth century. His work has been awarded virtually every major literary prize, including the Pulitzer Prize for Literature (twice), the Nobel Prize, the National Book Award and The Legion of Honor. In his most famous novels, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! ( 1936), Faulkner addresses universal themes—the individual vs. the family, determinism vs. free will, the weight of history—through the mythical creation of the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, where many of his most famous novels take place. Essentially recreating a whole history of the South from its earliest settlers to the defining event for generations of southerners, the Civil War, and on through to the first half of the twentieth century, Faulkner is famous for his complicated genealogies, complex plots, and dense writing style. The Faulknerian language is at once strikingly innovative in structure, form and style as well as beautifully lyrical and poetic. William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, to Murray and Maud Butler Faulkner. The family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, shortly after his birth. Faulkner would remain a life-long resident of Oxford and its regional geography and history would be a source of inspiration for much of his most acclaimed fictions. Faulkner was a bright but sporadic student, dropping out of high school and attending only a little over a year of college. His formal training can be relegated to a few years of schooling; his informal training can be ascribed to his self-confessed habit of soaking up family histories and local legends, to be transformed into the epic stories of his 24 published volumes. By the fall of 1921, when he was 24, Faulkner’s educational career was over and he embarked on a five-year period marked by wandering and restlessness. He spent a brief time in New York as a bookstore clerk, working for the soon-to-be influential Elizabeth Prall. On his return to Oxford later that year he began a short-lived stint as postmaster at the University of Mississippi post office (by all accounts failing miserably, spending most of his time playing cards, drinking and losing the mail). In 1922 Faulkner was asked to become scoutmaster of the local Oxford Boy Scouts. Both jobs ended in 1924 for reasons that are not clear, though probably due in part to his excessive drinking during this time. On a visit to Elizabeth Prall in New Orleans, Faulkner met her husband, the writer Sherwood Anderson. A friendship was soon established and Anderson quickly became an important influence. It was chiefly at the urging of Anderson that Faulkner had his first novel A Soldiers’ Pay published in 1926. Anderson is also credited with encouraging Faulkner to write about what he knew best: his own home region of Northern Mississippi. In the following ten-year period, 1926-36, Faulkner published ten books, among these some of his very best works. Never able to support himself solely as a novelist, Faulkner worked sporadically for various Hollywood studios as a screenwriter. (Chief among his screen credits are the adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep.) Faulkner spent much of his early career in relative obscurity. Apart from Sanctuary—a 1931 best-seller—most of his books were out of print by the mid 1940s. A major reevaluation of his work took place upon the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946) with an important introduction by the influential literary critic Malcolm Cowley. In 1949 Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The next ten years were spent shuttling around the country and the world, accepting awards and going on cultural exchanges to Russia, South America and Japan. Despite the constant travel Faulkner always maintained his base in Oxford, the source for so much of his fiction and the place that he called home. Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962. He is buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford, Mississippi.
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