William Faulkner – Author Biography
Early Life
William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi, the heart of the Deep South that would become his great subject. He dropped out of high school and briefly attended the University of Mississippi, served in the Royal Air Force in Canada during World War I, and worked odd jobs — including a famously inattentive stint as the university postmaster — while writing poetry and his first novels.
Career
Faulkner’s early novels attracted little attention, but beginning with Sartoris (1929) he invented Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional Mississippi county that became one of literature’s great imagined places. In an astonishing burst between 1929 and 1936 he produced The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! — works almost no one bought at the time. To support his family he worked as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1930s and 1940s, collaborating on films including To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. Recognition finally arrived with the 1946 Portable Faulkner anthology, and in 1949 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi.
Major Works
Faulkner’s essential novels are The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and the Snopes trilogy — The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion. Go Down, Moses (1942) contains the celebrated novella “The Bear.” His later A Fable won the Pulitzer Prize, and The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer posthumously.
Writing Style and Themes
Faulkner is the great American modernist of the South. His style — long, looping sentences, stream-of-consciousness narration, fractured chronology — was designed to capture how the past lives inside the present: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” His great themes are the curse of slavery and racism, the decay of the Southern aristocracy, guilt and endurance, and the stories families tell to survive their own histories. His narrators are often unreliable, his truths multiple, and his moral vision unflinching.
Legacy
William Faulkner is universally ranked among the greatest American writers, the Southern counterpart to Joyce and Proust in the modernist canon. His Nobel acceptance speech — with its famous declaration that man will “not merely endure: he will prevail” — is one of the great statements of literary purpose. He transformed American fiction’s sense of what was possible in language and structure, and Yoknapatawpha County remains the model for every fictional world built to hold a region’s entire history.
Faulkner’s Nobel Prize lecture — insisting that the writer’s duty is to write about “the human heart in conflict with itself” and that man will “not merely endure: he will prevail” — is among the most famous speeches in literary history. Though he claimed to write in Hollywood only for money, his screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep are classics of film dialogue. Today Oxford, Mississippi, preserves his home Rowan Oak as a museum, and Yoknapatawpha County remains the most fully realized fictional world in American literature.
