William Faulkner

William Faulkner 1897-1962, American novelist, b. New Albany, Miss., one of the great American writers of the 20th cent. Born into an old Southern family named Falkner, he changed the spelling of his last name to Faulkner when he published his first book, a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun, in 1924. Faulkner trained in Canada as a cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force in 1918, attended the Univ. of Mississippi in 1919-20, and lived in Paris briefly in 1925. In 1931 he bought a pre-Civil War mansion, "Rowanoak," in Oxford, Miss., where he lived, a virtual recluse, for the rest of his life. As a writer Faulkner's primary concern was to probe his own region, the deep South. Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha county, an imaginary area in Mississippi with a colorful history and a richly varied population. The county is a microcosm of the South as a whole, and Faulkner's novels examine the effects of the dissolution of traditional values and authority on all levels of Southern society. One of his primary themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites. Because Faulkner's novels treat the decay and anguish of the South since the Civil War, they abound in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life. The master of a rhetorical, highly symbolic style, Faulkner was also a brilliant literary technician, making frequent use of convoluted time sequences and of the stream of consciousness technique. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. His best-known novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize). In addition to novels Faulkner published several volumes of short stories including These 13 (1931), Go Down, Moses (1942), Knight's Gambit (1949), and Big Woods (1955); and collections of essays and poems.

Bibliography: See the reminiscences of his brother, John (1963); biographies by H. H. Waggoner (1959) and J. Blotner (2 vol., 1974, repr. 1984); studies by R. P. Adams (1968), L. G. Leary (1973), and J. W. Reed, Jr. (1973); F. J. Hoffman and O. W. Vickery, ed., William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (1960).

Faulkner, William (1897–1962), novelist and short story writer.Born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in nearby Oxford, William Faulkner dropped out of high school to pursue a writing career, first as a poet and later as a fiction writer. Influenced by the novelist Sherwood Anderson, whom he met while living in New Orleans, Faulkner published his first two novels, Soldier's Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), to limited critical success.

In the late 1920s, Faulkner returned to Oxford and devoted his literary efforts to works exploring life in north Mississippi. His best novels and stories, including The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom! Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942), portrayed with often dizzying complexity the life and history of his fictional Mississippi county, Yoknapatawpha. Something close to tragic doom cloaks almost all of Faulkner's work, particularly his portrayal of the South's massive cultural transformations wrought by forces of intolerance, modernization, and greed.

Faulkner's critical reputation—and financial solvency—floundered precariously in the 1930s and 1940s. Drinking heavily, he subsisted primarily by writing Hollywood screenplays. Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner (1946) initiated a resurgence of critical interest. Capping this stunning critical reappraisal, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Although he continued to write, little of his later fiction, including A Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), matched the power and complexity of his earlier work.

Faulkner has come to be regarded as one of America's—and the world's—greatest writers. His dense writing style embodies his belief that every moment of existence is pressured almost to suffocation by all that has come before—the past is never past. His experiments with narrative form and structure were profoundly influential. As his fellow southern writer Flannery O'Connor once wrote, “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down”.
See also Literature: Since World War I; Twenties, The.

Bibliography

Joseph Blotner , Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols., 1974.
Richard Gray , The Life of William Faulkner, 1994.

Robert H. Brinkmeyer Jr.