Brayden nolte

Mckenzie
March 31, y

William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize

laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play,
poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and
short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette
County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature
generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published
as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was
relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for
which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works,
A Fable and his last novel The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He
had three younger brothers: Murry Charles "Jack" Falkner, author John
Falkner, and Dean Swift Falkner . Soon after his first birthday, his family
moved to Ripley, Mississippi, where his father worked as the treasurer for the
family-owned Gulf & Chicago Railroad Company. Murry hoped to inherit the
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railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, but John had little
confidence in Murry's ability to run a business and sold it for $75,000.
Following the sale of the railroad business, Murry became disappointed and
planned a new start for his family by moving to Texas and becoming a
rancher. Maud, however, disagreed with this proposition, and it was decided
that they would move to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murry's father owned
several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work. Thus, four days
prior to William's fifth birthday on September 21, 1902, the Falkner family
settled in Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life.
His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia
Butler, and Caroline Barr crucially influenced the development of Faulkner's
artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were avid readers and
also painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. While
Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish,
Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church.
She taught her sons to read before sending them to public school and
exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens and Grimms' Fairy Tales.
As a schoolchild, Faulkner had much success early on. He excelled in the
first grade, skipped the second, and continued doing well through the third
and fourth grades. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth
grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much more quiet and withdrawn
child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became somewhat indifferent
to his schoolwork, even though he began to study the history of Mississippi
on his own time in the seventh grade. The decline of his performance in
school continued and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh, and then
final grade, and never graduating from high school.
When he was 17, Faulkner met Philip Stone, who would later become an
important early influence on his writing. Stone was four years his senior and
came from one of Oxford's older families; he was passionate about literature
and had already earned bachelor's degrees from Yale and the University of
Mississippi. At the University of Mississippi, Faulkner joined the Sigma Alpha
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Epsilon fraternity. There he was supported in his dream to become a writer.

Stone read and was impressed by some of Faulkner's early poetry and was
one of the first to discover Faulkner's talent and artistic potential. Stone
became a literary mentor to the young Faulkner, introducing him to writers
such as James Joyce, who would come to have an influence on Faulkner's
own writing. In his early 20s, Faulkner would give poems and short stories he
had written to Stone, in hopes of them being published. Stone would in turn
send these to publishers, but they were uniformly rejected. Despite his
claims to have done so, records now available to the public indicate that
Faulkner was never actually a member of the British Royal Flying Corps and
never saw service during the First World War.
In 1918, Faulkner himself made the change to his surname from the
original "Falkner." However, according to one story, a careless typesetter
simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of his
first book, Faulkner was asked whether he wanted a change. He supposedly
replied, "Either way suits me".
In adolescence, Faulkner began writing poetry almost exclusively. He did
not write his first novel until 1925. His literary influences are deep and wide.
He once stated that he modeled his early writing on the Romantic era in late
18th- and early 19th-century England. William was able to attend classes at
the university due to his father having a job there as a business manager. He
skipped classes often and received a D grade in English. However, some of
his poems were published in campus journals.
Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was residing
in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers'
Pay, The miniature house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from
St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, is now the premises of Faulkner House
Books, where it also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner
Society.
During the summer of 1927, Faulkner wrote his first novel set in his
fictional Yoknapatawpha County, entitled Flags in the Dust. This novel drew
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heavily on the traditions and history of the South, in which Faulkner had been
engrossed in his youth. He was extremely proud of the novel upon its
completion and he believed it to be a significant step up from his previous
two novels. However, when submitted for publication, it was rejected by the
publishers Boni & Liveright. Faulkner was devastated by this rejection, but he
eventually allowed his literary agent, Ben Wasson, to significantly edit the
text, and the novel was finally published in 1928 as Sartoris. After its
completion, Faulkner this time insisted that Ben Wasson not do any editing or
add any punctuation for clarity. Beginning in 1930, Faulkner sent out some of
his short stories to various national magazines. Several of his stories were
published and this brought him enough income to buy a house in Oxford for
his family to live in, which he named Rowan Oak.
However, by 1932, Faulkner was in a much less secure financial position.
He had asked his agent, Ben Wasson to sell the serialization rights for his
newly completed novel, Light in August, to a magazine for $5,000, but none
accepted the offer. Then MGM Studios offered Faulkner work as a
screenwriter in Hollywood. Although not an avid moviegoer, he needed the
money, and so accepted the job offer and arrived in Culver City, California, in
May 1932. There he worked with director Howard Hawks, with whom he
quickly developed a friendship, as they both enjoyed drinking and hunting.
Howard Hawks's brother William Hawks became Faulkner's Hollywood agent.
Faulkner would continue to find reliable work as a screenwriter for years to
come throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He was badly injured in a horse
riding accident in 1959, and died of a heart attack, aged 64, on July 6, 1962,
at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
Personal life
As a teenager in Oxford, Faulkner dated Estelle Oldham, the popular
daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham, and believed he would some day
marry her. However, Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and in
1918 one of them, Cornell Franklin, proposed marriage to her before Faulkner
did. Estelle's parents insisted she marry Cornell, as he was an Ole Miss law
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graduate, had recently been commissioned as a major in the Hawaiian

Territorial Forces, and came from a respectable family with which they were
old friends. Estelle's marriage to Franklin fell apart ten years later, and she
was divorced in April 1929. Faulkner married Estelle in June 1929 at College
Hill Presbyterian Church just outside Oxford, Mississippi. They honeymooned
on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first
living with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase.
In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that
time as The Shegog Place from Irish planter Robert Shegog. After his death,
Estelle and their daughter, Jill, lived at Rowan Oak until Estelle's death in
1972. The property was sold to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The
house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner's day.
Faulkner's scribblings are still preserved on the wall there, including the dayby-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his
small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the novel A Fable.
The quality and quantity of Faulkner's literary output were achieved
despite a lifelong drinking problem. He rarely drank while writing, preferring
instead to binge after a project's completion.
Faulkner is known to have had several extramarital affairs. One was with
Howard Hawks's secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter, later known as
Meta Wilde. Another, from 1949 to 1953, was with a young writer, Joan
Williams, who made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971
novel, The Wintering.
When Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel
Prize, he met Else Jonsson and they had an affair that lasted until the end of
1953. Else was the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson, reporter for Dagens
Nyheter in New York from 1943 to 1946, who had interviewed Faulkner in
1946 and introduced his works to Swedish readers. At the banquet in 1950
where they met, publisher Tor Bonnier referred to Else as widow of the man
responsible for Faulkner being awarded the prize.
Writing
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From the early 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, when he left for
California, Faulkner published 13 novels and many short stories. Such a body
of work formed the basis of his reputation and led to his being awarded the
Nobel Prize at age 52. Faulkner's prodigious output, mainly driven by an
obscure writer's need for money, includes his most celebrated novels such as
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom,
Absalom! . Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories.
His first short story collection, These 13, includes many of his most
acclaimed stories, including "A Rose for Emily", "Red Leaves", "That Evening
Sun", and "Dry September". Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels
in Yoknapatawpha Countybased on, and nearly geographically identical to,
Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, is the county
seat. Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner's "postage stamp", and the bulk of work
that it represents is widely considered by critics to amount to one of the
most monumental fictional creations in the history of literature. Three novels,
The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion, known collectively as the Snopes
Trilogy, document the town of Jefferson and its environs, as an extended
family headed by Flem Snopes insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of
the general populace.
Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention
to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his
contemporary Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of
consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle,
cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide
variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor
white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.
In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner remarked: Let
the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.
There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young
writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own
mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is
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good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how
much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him. Another esteemed
Southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, stated that "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".
Faulkner wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small
printings, The Marble Faun and A Green Bough, and a collection of crimefiction short stories, Knight's Gambit .
Criticism
Faulkner's work has been examined by many critics from a wide variety
of critical perspectives. The New Critics became very interested in Faulkner's
work, with Cleanth Brooks writing The Yoknapatawpha Country and Michael
Millgate writing The Achievement of William Faulkner. Since then, critics have
looked at Faulkner's work using other approaches, such as feminist and
psychoanalytic methods. Faulkner's works have been placed within the
literary traditions of modernism and the Southern Renaissance.
According to critic and translator Valerie Miles, Faulkner's influence on
Latin American fiction is considerable, with fictional worlds created by
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Carlos Onetti being "very much in the vein
of" Yoknapatawpha: "The Death of Artemio Cruz wouldn't exist if not for As I
Lay Dying".
Awards
Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his
powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".
It was awarded at the following year's banquet along with the 1950 Prize to
Bertrand Russell. Faulkner detested the fame and glory that resulted from his
recognition. His aversion was so great that his 17-year-old daughter learned
of the Nobel Prize only when she was called to the principal's office during
the school day.

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He donated part of his Nobel money "to establish a fund to support and
encourage new fiction writers", eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction, and donated another part to a local Oxford bank,
establishing a scholarship fund to help educate African-American teachers at
Rust College in nearby Holly Springs, Mississippi. The government of France
made Faulkner a Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1951.
Faulkner was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered
"minor" novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and
the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer
in 1963.
He also won the U.S. National Book Award twice, for Collected Stories in
1951
and A Fable in 1955.
In 1946 he was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery
Magazine Award and placed second to Rhea Galati.
The United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in his
honor on August 3, 1987. It is noteworthy that Faulkner had once served as
Postmaster at the University of Mississippi, and in his letter of resignation in
1923 wrote:
As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life
influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I
propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two
cents to invest in a postage stamp. This, sir, is my resignation.
Bibliography
Collections
The manuscripts of most of Faulkner's works, correspondence, personal
papers, and over 300 books from his working library reside at the Albert and
Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, where
he spent much of his time in his final years. The library also houses some of
the writer's personal effects and the papers of major Faulkner associates and

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scholars such as his biographer Joseph Blotner, bibliographer Linton Massey,

and Random House editor Albert Erskine.
Southeast Missouri State University, where the Center for Faulkner
Studies is located, also owns a generous collection of Faulkner materials
including first editions, manuscripts, letters, photographs, artwork, and many
materials pertaining to Faulkner's time in Hollywood. The university
possesses many personal files and letters kept by Joseph Blotner, along with
books and letters that once belonged to Malcolm Cowley, another famous
editor for William Faulkner. The university achieved the collection thanks to a
generous donation by Louis Daniel Brodsky, a collector of Faulkner materials,
in 1989.

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