FAULKNER, WILLIAM

William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897–July 6, 1962) is one of America's most important and highly regarded writers of fiction. Although his literary career spanned four decades, almost all of his most important work dates from between 1929 and 1942, a period beginning with the appearance of his novels Sartoris (1929) and The Sound and the Fury (1929), and closing with Go Down, Moses (1942). Faulkner's work is perhaps most noted for its complex narrative structure and its dazzling use of language and voice.

Born in New Albany, Mississippi, into a prominent (though somewhat declining) north Mississippi family, Faulkner spent most of his childhood down the road in Oxford, where his family moved in 1902. In 1915, Faulkner dropped out of high school to pursue a career in writing, first as poet and later as fiction writer. Encouraged and supported by Oxford lawyer Phil Stone, Faulkner began a series of travels that took him to the Northeast, Canada, Europe, and New Orleans, with occasional stops back in Oxford. Strongly influenced by Sherwood Anderson, whom he first met in 1924 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 turned his literary efforts almost exclusively to works exploring life in north Mississippi. In a number of his best novels and stories, including Sartoris (1929), 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), and Go Down, Moses (1942), Faulkner 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 in 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 until the late 1940s, when publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner initiated a resurgence of interest. Capping this stunning critical reappraisal was Faulkner's receiving of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Although he continued to write until his death in 1962, little of Faulkner's later fiction matches the power, intensity, and complexity of his work from the late 1920s through the early 1940s.

Faulkner is now regarded as one of America's and the world's greatest writers. His writing style, dense and packed at times to the bursting point, embodies his belief that every moment of existence is pressured almost to suffocation by all that has come before—the past, as he said, is never past. His experiments with narrative form and structure mark Faulkner as one of the greats of high modernism, and profoundly influenced the shape of the twentieth-century novel. Nowhere was his influence more dominant than in the development of twentieth-century Southern literature, where not only his narrative fireworks but also his thematic concerns—particularly the grinding conflict between the traditional and the modern—became for several generations touchstones of Southern expression.

See Also: LITERATURE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. 1974.

Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. 1963.

Gray, Richard. The Life of William Faulkner: A Critical Biography. 1994.

Minter, David. William Faulkner: His Life and Work. 1980.

Singal, Daniel. William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist. 1997.

Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. 1993.

Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr.