William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962), a major American 20th-century novelist, chronicled the decline and decay of the aristocratic South with an imaginative power and psychological depth that transcend mere regionalism.

William Faulkner was born on Sept. 25, 1897, in New Albany, Miss. He grew up in Oxford, Miss., which appears in his fiction as "Jefferson" in "Yoknapatawpha County." William was the oldest of four brothers. Both parents came from wealthy families reduced to genteel poverty by the Civil War. A great-grandfather, Col. William Falkner (as the family spelled its name), had authored The White Rose of Memphis, a popular success of the 1880s. William's father owned a hardware store and livery stable in Oxford and later became business manager of the state university. William attended public school only fitfully after the fifth grade; he never graduated from high school.

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.

In 1919 Faulkner enrolled at the University of Mississippi as a special student but left the next year for New York City. After several odd jobs in New York and Mississippi, he became postmaster at the Mississippi University Station; he was fired in 1924. In 1925 he and a friend made a walking tour of Europe, returning home in 1926.

During the years 1926-1930 Faulkner published a series of distinguished novels, none commercially successful. But in 1931 the success of Sanctuary, written expressly to make money, freed him of financial worries. He went to Hollywood for a year as a scenarist and an adviser.

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 (at this time all of Faulkner's books were out of print!).

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 had married Estelle Oldham in 1929, and they lived together in Oxford until his death on July 6, 1962. He 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.

Poetry and Short Stories

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.

Early Novels

Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927) precede Sartoris (1927), Faulkner's first important work, in which he begins his Yoknapatawpha saga. This saga, Faulkner's imaginative recreation of the tragedy of the American South, is a Balzacian provincial cycle in which each novel interrelates, clarifies, and redefines the characters. The central figure is Bayard Sartoris, returned from the war, who drives and drinks violently to compensate for his sense of alienation. He seems determined to find some extraordinary form of self-destruction. He becomes an experimental aviator and dies in a crash, leaving his pregnant wife to sustain the family name. The novel introduces families that reappear in many of Faulkner's novels and stories: the Sartoris and Compson families, representing the agrarian, aristocratic Old South; and the Snopes clan, representing the ruthless, mercantile New South.

"The Sound and the Fury"

The book generally regarded as Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929), is a radical departure from conventional novelistic form. It uses a stream-of-consciousness method, rendering a different type of mentality in each of its four sections. The title, taken from Macbeth's utterance of cosmic despair in Shakespeare's play, is a clue to the profound pessimism of the novel, which records the decay and degeneracy of the Compson family and, by implication, of the aristocratic South. It is difficult to read, and Faulkner's "Appendix," written much later at the publisher's request, hardly clarifies it.

Each section takes place in a single day; three sections are set in 1928 and one in 1910. The difficulties begin with the fact that the 1910 section is placed second in the book, and the other three are not sequential in their 1928 three-day span. Further, the opening section is rendered in the stream of consciousness of an idiot, who cannot distinguish past from present.

Unquestionably the most difficult for Faulkner to write, the Benjy section (of April 7, 1928) is also the most difficult to read. It has been likened to a prose poem, with the succeeding three sections being simply variations on its theme of futility. Because the mentally impaired Benjy lives in a state of timelessness, his report is purely sensuous, and the reader must figure out his own chronology. Faulkner gives two aids: the device of signaling time shifts by alternating the typeface between bold and italic, and the variance of the African American attending Benjy (Roskus and Dilsey ca. 1898; Versh, T.P., and Frony ca. 1910; Luster ca. 1928).

Out of Benjy's garbled report come a number of facts and motifs. He is 33 years old, in the constant care of an African American youth named Luster. Benjy is tormented by the absence of his sister, Candace, though she has been out of the household for 18 years; each time he hears golfers on the neighboring course call "Caddy!" (coincidentally her nickname), he is painfully reminded of her. The golf course, formerly part of the Compson estate, was sold so that Benjy's older brother, Quentin, could attend Harvard, where he committed suicide in 1910. Mrs. Compson is a self-pitying woman; Mr. Compson was a drunkard; Uncle Maury was a womanizer; Candace was sexually promiscuous and, in turn, her daughter, confusingly called Quentin (after her dead uncle), is also promiscuous. Benjy has been castrated at his brother Jason's order.

Ironically, the most sensitive and intelligent Compson, Quentin (whose day in the novel is June 1, 1910), shares Benjy's obsession about their sister. Candace and the past dominate Quentin's section, which is set in Boston on the day he commits suicide. His musings add more facts in the novel's mosaic. The head of the family, Mr. Compson, is wise but cynical and despairing. Quentin has falsely confessed incest with Candace to his father; the father has not believed him. Quentin had fought one of Candace's lovers over her "honor." He is oppressed by knowing that the pregnant Candace is to be married off to a northern banker; the impending marriage is symbolic to Quentin of his irremediable and intolerable severance from Candace and is the reason for his suicidal state. Quentin's ludicrously methodical preparations for his suicide culminate when the last thing he does before leaving to kill himself is brush his teeth.

Jason (his day in the novel is April 6, 1928) is one of the great comic villains of literature. He has an irrational, jealous loathing of Candace. Now head of the family, he complains bitterly of his responsibilities as guardian of Candace's daughter, Quentin, while systematically stealing the money Candace sends for her care. Jason is cast in the Snopes mold—materialistic, greedy, and cunning. What makes him humorous is his self-pity. He sees himself as victim—of Candace, who he feels has cost him a desired job; of his niece, whose promiscuity seems a personal affront; of Benjy, whose condition causes embarrassment; of Mrs. Compson, whom he constantly bullies and whose inefficiency has burdened him; of the Jews, whom he blames for his stock market losses; of the servants, whose employment necessitates his own work at a menial job. Jason's lack of soul is evident in all his habits. He leaves no mark on anything and lives totally in the present—the perfect Philistine of the New South.

The novel's final section, the only one told in the third person, gives the point of view of the sensible old black servant, Dilsey (her day is April 8, 1928). As with other Faulkner African Americans, her presence is chiefly functional: her good sense and solidity point up the decadence of the whites. In this section Jason meets with an ironic, overwhelming defeat. The novel's chief social implication is that the South is doomed.

Novels of the 1930s

As I Lay Dying (1930) is a farcical burlesque epic, again using the multiple stream-of-consciousness method to tell the grotesque, humorous story of a family of poor whites intent on fulfilling the mother's deathbed request for burial. Sanctuary (1931), taken seriously by most critics, was discounted by Faulkner as a "potboiler." It is the lurid tale of Popeye, a sexually mutilated bootlegger, who has degenerate sexual acts performed for his gratification. One of his victims is a college girl whose lie in Popeye's behalf at the trial of another bootlegger results in the latter's conviction of Popeye's crime. In an ironic ending, Popeye is hanged for a crime of which he is innocent.

The story in Light in August (1932) takes place in a single day. It is overly complicated by a subplot. Beginning with a pregnant girl searching for her lover, this plot is subordinated to the story of Joe Christmas (same initials as Jesus Christ), whose uncertain racial identity perplexes him. Though structurally unsound, Light in August generates enormous power and probably ranks second among Faulkner's books.

Late Novels

Faulkner's creativity ebbed after 1935. Though occasionally interesting and fitfully brilliant, his work tended to be increasingly repetitious, perverse, and mannered to the point of self-parody.

Pylon (1935), one of Faulkner's weakest novels, is the story of a flying circus team. Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is an extremely complex novel; the title comes from the biblical cry of David ("My son, my son!"). This novel tells of a poor white from the Virginia hills who marries an aristocractic Mississippi woman, inadvertently launching a three-generation family cycle of violence, degeneracy, and mental retardation.

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). Of this novel's four parts, the first and the last manifest Faulkner's greatest faults: they are talky and oblique and seem out of focus. The middle sections, however, are Faulkner at his best.

Intruder in the Dust (1948) takes a liberal view of southern race relations. Lucas Beauchamp, an eccentric old African American, is saved from a false murder charge through the efforts of fair-minded whites. 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.

Further Reading

Faulkner's thoughts on literature and many other subjects can be found in James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (1968). Faulkner is discussed in several memoirs: John Faulkner, My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Reminiscence (1963), and Murry C. Falkner, The Falkners of Mississippi: A Memoir (1967). A biography of Faulkner is in the introduction of Edmond L. Volpe, A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner (1964). Some of the best critical work on Faulkner is in Frederick J.

Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery, eds., William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism (1960). Although Joseph Blotner's biography, in progress, should be the definitive work, useful studies of Faulkner's life and work include Irving Malin, William Faulkner: An Interpretation (1957); William Van O'Connor, William Faulkner (1959); Hyatt Howe Waggoner, William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World (1959); Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966); and H. Edward Richardson, William Faulkner: Journey to Self-Discovery (1969). See also Robert Penn Warren, ed., Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays (1966), and Richard P. Adams, Faulkner: Myth and Motion (1968). □

FAULKNER, WILLIAM 1897-1962

Writer

The New Regionalism

William Faulkner, considered by many to be the greatest modern American writer, mined the nineteenth-century history of the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County in his native Mississippi to create a literature that was a fusion of the American tradition of regionalism and modernism. Focusing on a few families to whom he returned in story after story, novel after novel, Faulkner examined the social structure in the Deep South. However, his fiction was anything but the local color of the earlier Regionalists. Rather, Faulkner used the modernist techniques of Eliot and Joyce to create a literature that was dazzlingly complex in form and often violent and tragic in content.

Beginnings

William Falkner, as he was born, was raised in the university town of Oxford, Mississippi, where he grew up as a dreamy, introverted child. After dropping out of high school halfway through his last year, he spent years drifting from a job bookkeeping in his grandfather's bank to joining the Canadian Royal Air Force, where he added the u to his name and where, enlisting too late for the war, he never completed his flight training. This fact did not keep him from returning to Oxford with exciting tales of his military adventures, though. His narrative endeavors soon took a different shape when, upon the advice of a friend at the University of Mississippi, he sent a story to the New Republic. The story's publication encouraged him, and he enrolled at the university as a special student for the year 1919-1920. Though his formal education ended that year, it was a productive period for him, during which he wrote a slender volume of poems, as well as a one-act play, Marionettes. His wanderings took him to New York, where he worked in a bookstore for a few months, and back to Mississippi, where he wrote for the campus literary magazine and worked, in desultory fashion, as the postmaster of the campus post office, a job from which he was fired in 1924 for failing to deliver the mail. At writer Sherwood Anderson's suggestion Faulkner sent his first novel, the bitter post-World War I narrative Soldier's Pay, to Boni and Liveright, where it was accepted and published in 1926. His second novel, a study of an artist's development titled Mosquitoes, appeared in 1927. By his third novel, Sartoris (1929), Faulkner was beginning to embark on the exploration of the tangled web of southern history and family that was to mark his writing career. However, it was not until he published The Sound and the Fury (1929) that Faulkner fully explored the nature both of human consciousness and of history in a prose that was dense, provocative, and destined to stand as one of the monuments of American literature.

The Sound and the Fury

A novel in four parts, The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the Compson family and its declining fortunes through different voices, including that of Benjy, the retarded younger brother, and Quentin, the oldest brother, who has suffered a nervous breakdown and who ultimately commits suicide. Like the southern Agrarians, Faulkner charts the rise of commercialism in the South and the corresponding decline of the traditional white upper-middle-class family. In The Sound and the Fury, as in the novels to follow, the history of the Compsons and of their region is shown to be violent, sexualized, and marked by insanity and premature death.

A Flourishing Career

Faulkner proved to be as prolific as he was innovative. His next novel, though, was Sanctuary, which he had intended as a moneymaker to support him and his new wife, Estelle Oldham Franklin. It was deemed by his editor to be so sensational as to be unpublishable without substantial cuts. As I Lay Dying (1930), his next published novel, was as experimental as The Sound and the Fury. Narrated by fifteen different voices, the novel tells the story of a single day. Though it was praised by the critics, it did not sell. By this point Faulkner was supporting himself by selling stones to magazines, notably the Saturday Evening Post. Although critics were not nearly as impressed by Sanctuary, which finally appeared in 1931, as by his earlier work, this study of pure human evil sold extremely well, outraged southern reviewers, and was considered so scandalous that in Oxford's drugstore it was sold in a brown paper wrapper. However, even the extremely well-reviewed novel Light in August, which came out the following year, was not enough to support the Faulkners, and when Hollywood called, Faulkner responded.

Hollywood

Faulkner spent most of 1932 in Hollywood, writing screenplays under contract to M-G-M. His first real success came with the Joan Crawford and Franchot Tone vehicle Today We Live (1933), which he wrote for director Howard Hawks. Other screenplays included the 1936 war film The Road to Glory, which he wrote with Joel Sayre and which was also directed by Hawks, this time for 20th Century—Fox. Faulkner's screenwriting career continued into the 1950s with pictures such as To Have and Have Not (1945), the film version of the Ernest Hemingway novel, which he wrote with Jules Furthman, and The Big Sleep (1946), the film version of the Raymond Chandler detective novel, which he wrote with Furthman and Leigh Brackett. Although his paychecks may have come from Hollywood, Faulkner's main effort went into his fiction, thirteen volumes of which he published during the 1930s, These works included Pylon (1935) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), considered by many critics to be his greatest work, in which he continues to plumb the depths of the southern family.

Nobel Laurels

Faulkner wrote much less during the 1940s and 1950s, and what he wrote was less well received than had been his work during the 1930s. However, critics have recently begun to reevaluate in a more positive light such works as Go Down, Moses (1942) and Intruder in the Dust (1948), both of which treat black life in the South. The publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 helped to revive his reputation, and his 1950 Nobel Prize for literature sealed it. In 1955 he was awarded the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his otherwise ill-received World War II novel, A Fable.

Source:

Joseph Blotner, Faulkner; A Biography (NY: Random House, 1974).

FAULKNER, WILLIAM 1897-1962

Writer

Awards

A self-described Mississippi farmer was hailed as one of the world's greatest writers in 1950. In June the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded William Faulkner the Howells Medal, their highest honor to a senior writer, and in November Faulkner was named winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, which the Swedish Academy had withheld the previous year. In America the choice was roundly criticized. Faulkner was variously described in the popular press as depraved, obscure, insignificant, and irrelevant. As recently as 1945 none of Faulkner's seventeen books had been in print, and his two new novels of the early 1950s, A Requiem for a Nun (1951) and A Fable (1954), did little in the minds of most readers to justify the American Academy's and the Swedish Academy's judgments.

A Requiem for a Nun.

It was unclear to most readers whether A Requiem for a Nun was a play or a novel. It had elements of each and was criticized with equal vehemence when presented in either form. Faulkner clarified by explaining that the work | was a novel in the form of a play. Even setting aside confusion about the form, readers in the 1950s were | offended by the plot, which recalls brutal rape and abandonment in the context of a murder trial for infanticide that results in the death sentence of a mad, drug-addicted maid. The Times reviewer likened Faulkner's novel to the type of farming or lumber cutting that left the land denuded.

A Fable.

A Fable created further controversy. It was a sort of Christian allegory played out during a privately declared armistice on the battlefields of France during World War I. Such highbrow reviewers as Maxwell Geismar and Leslie Fiedler tended to agree with Faulkner that A Fable was his best novel. That was, however, the minority opinion. Gilbert Highet in Harper's wrote that if A Fable had been sent to him without the author's name indicated, "It would have scarcely seemed possible that it was the work of a sane man who had lived through both world wars, still less that it was a major novel by a winner of the Nobel Prize." Opinions about Faulkner's greatness were so divided that Atlantic magazine ran an article in 1951 by critic Harvey Breit that promised to "make Mr. Faulkner's work more meaningful for those who wish to make up for lost time" because Faulkner had "never received the thorough reading he deserved from his own countrymen."

Public Service

Faulkner was an intensely private man, and he made the mistake after winning the Nobel Prize of assuming responsibility as a spokesman on certain public issues. He learned soon enough that literary talent does not necessarily arm one to practice the art of politics. The Cultural Services Office of the State Department asked Faulkner to participate in several events abroad, notably in Japan in 1955, where he was greeted warmly. During the decade he spent some eight months in various countries discharging his duties as a world citizen.

Controversy

It was in America that his efforts at diplomacy created controversy. Race relations was a chief domestic issue of the time, and the State Department looked to Faulkner to provide guidance. He took a position too liberal for segregationists, too conservative for integrationists, and too philosophical for pragmatists, angering almost everyone. At the request of President Eisenhower, in 1956 Faulkner joined with novelist John Steinbeck and poet Donald Hall in a government program called People to People to promote American values in Communist nations. After a frustrating three months Faulkner quit. In a letter to the New York Times on 13 October 1957, he observed that "white people and Negroes do not like and trust each other and perhaps never can," suggesting a cleavage that liberals construed to be bordering on racism. But, he continued, it may not be necessary for us to like one another; we must simply federate. He concluded that "because of the good luck of our still unspent and yet unexhausted past" the country might still prevail over its problem as people see the necessity of dedicating themselves to "the proposition that a community of individual free men not merely must endure, but can endure." Harper's magazine commented that the statement was "clearly and explicitly meaningless."

Return to Writing

By the end of the decade Faulkner had returned to what he did best—writing and talking, when he talked, about his work. In 1956 he accepted a temporary position as writer in residence at the University of Virginia that was renewed annually. Nonetheless, Faulkner enjoyed the university setting and turned his attentions back to literature. On 1 May 1957 The Town, the second volume of his highly acclaimed Snopes Trilogy, was published, and on 13 November 1959 the third volume, The Mansion, appeared. They were hailed as works worthy of a writer of his stature.

Sources:

Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974);

Harvey Breit, "William Faulkner," Atlantic, 188 (October 1951): 53 56;

Madeleine Chapsal, "A Lion in the Garden," Reporter, 13 (3 November 1955): 40;

Leslie Fiedler, "Stone Grotesques," New Republic, 131 (23 August 1954): 18-19;

Maxwell Geismar, "Latter-Day Christ Story," Saturday Review, 37 (31 July 1954): 11-12;

Brendan Gill, "Fifth Gospel," New Yorker, 30 (28 August 1954): 78-80;

Michel Gresset, A Faulkner Chronology (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985);

Gilbert Highet, "Sound and Fury," Harpers, 209 (September 1954): 98-104;

"Mr. Faulkner Exhausts the Future," Nation, 185 (26 October 1957): 274-275;

"No Sanctuary," Newsweek, 38 (24 September 1951): 90-92.

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), J. Blotner (2 vol., 1974, repr. 1984), and P. Weinstein (2009); 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); J. N. Duvall, ed., Faulkner and His Critics (2010).

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.

Faulkner, William (Cuthbert) (originally William Cuthbert Falkner), (1897–1962), American novelist, born in Mississippi, where he spent most of his life; the history and legends of the South, and of his own family, were the material of his greater books. While working as a journalist in New Orleans he met S. Anderson, who encouraged him to write his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926). Others followed, including Sartoris (1929), the first of the series about the decline of the Compson and Sartoris families, representative of the Old South, and the rise of the crude and unscrupulous Snopes family. The principal setting of these novels is ‘Jefferson’, a town in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County.

The Sound and the Fury (1929) is a narrative tour de force in which Faulkner views the decline of the South through several eyes, most remarkably those of Benjy Compson, a 33-year-old ‘idiot’. The work is an astonishing display of technical brilliance written in a sombre and lyrical mood. As I Lay Dying (1930) demonstrates Faulkner's comic as well as his tragic vision. He made his name with the more sensational Sanctuary (1931), and confirmed his reputation as one of the finest of modern novelists in Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Other important works include The Hamlet (1940), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and several volumes of short stories. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949. In England he found an early champion in A. Bennett, who wrote a preface for the 1930 English edition of Soldier's Pay.

Faulkner, William Cuthbert (1897–1962) US novelist. Faulkner's debut novel was Soldier's Pay (1925). Sartoris (1929) was the first in a series of novels set in the fictional Mississippi county of Yoknapatawpha. The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930) utilise a stream of consciousness style to explore the relationship of past to present. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) examine the effects of racism in the Deep South. Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature. He won Pulitzer Prizes for A Fable (1951), and his final novel The Reivers (1962).