William Faulkner Biography and List of Works

American short story writer, novelist, best known for his Yoknapatawpha cycle, a comédie humaine of the American South, which started in 1929 with SARTORIS / FLAGS IN THE DUST and completed with THE MANSION in 1959. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

"The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honour, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies."
(from Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 1959)

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner. While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. Faulkner lived most of his life in the town. About the age of 13, he began to write poetry. He dropped out of high school before graduating and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank.

After being rejected from the army because he was too short, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and had basic training in Toronto. He served with the RAF in World War I but did not see any action. After the war he studied literature at the University of Mississippi for a short time. In 1920 he left the university without taking a degree and moved to New York City, working as a clerk in a bookstore. Then he returned to Oxford where he supported himself as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi. Faulkner was fired for reading on the job. He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write fiction rather than poetry.

Faulkner's first book, THE MARBLE FAUN, a collection of poems, appeared in 1924, but did not gain success. In 1926 he published SOLDIER'S PAY, a novel centring on the return of a soldier, who has been physically and psychologically disabled in WW I. It was followed by MOSQUITOES, a satirical portrait of bohemian life, artist and intellectuals, in New Orleans. The early works of Faulkner bear witness to his reading of Keats, Tennyson, Swinburne, and the literature of the 1890s.

In 1929 Faulkner wrote SARTORIS, the first of fifteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi. The book was later reissued entitled FLAGS IN THE DUST (1973). The Yoknapatawpha novels spanned the decades of economic decline from the American Civil War through the Depression. Racism, class division, family as both life force and curse, are the recurring themes along with recurring characters and places. Faulkner used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling of cause and effect (LIGHT IN AUGUST) to series of snapshots (AS I LAY DYING) or collage (THE SOUND AND THE FURY). ABSALOM, ABSALOM!, generally considered Faulkner's masterpiece, operates through a range of voices, all trying to unravel the mysteries of Thomas Sutpen's violent life.

In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham Franklin and purchased next year the traditional pillared house in Oxford, which he named Rowan Oak. With The Sound and the Fury (1929), his first masterwork, Faulkner gained recognition as a writer. While working at an electrical power station in a nightshift job, he wrote As I Lay Dying (1930). SANCTUARY (1931) was a story of a young woman who is raped by a murderer and finds sanctuary in a brothel. In these and the following works Faulkner experimented with methods of narration, using page-long sentences, and forcing the reader to hold in mind details and phrases that are meaningful only at the end of the story.

To earn money Faulker, worked over the next 20 years in Hollywood on several screenplays, including The Road to Glory (1936), Gunga Din (1939), To Have and Have Not (1945), which was based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), based on Raymond Chandler's novel. Between screenwriting Faulkner published several novel. PYLON (1934) was a story of four adults and a child, who travel from air show to another. ABSALOM, ABSALOM! (1936) Concentrated on Thomas Sutpen's attempts to found a Southern dynasty in the 19th-century Mississippi. THE WILD PALMS (1939) was a story of the Snopes family, in which the character McCord is based on Ernest Hemingway and parallels A Farwell to Arms. GO DOWN MOSES, AND OTHER STORIES (1942) contained 'The Bear', one of his most celebrates pieces of short fiction.

"He wrote A Fable in my house. He'd be typing away in the middle of the night. Worked right on the typewriter, typed all night. I walked in on him, asked him what he was working on there in the middle of the night. He said, "Oh... on a novel." "Well... what's it about?" He said, "Oh, it's about Jesus Christ coming to earth during the World War."
( A.I. Bezzerides in The Big Book of Noir, ed. by Ed Gorman, Lee Server and Martin H. Greenberg, 1998)

By 1945, when Faulkner's novels were out of print, he moved again to Hollywood to write under contract movie scripts, writing mostly for director Howard Hawks. Faulkner's second period of success started in 1946 with the publication of THE PORTABLE FAULKNER, which rescued him from near-oblivion. However, Faulkner's physique was seriously weakened by a life of hard drinking. He was plagued by his own problems and the declining heath of his wife Estelle. He published in 1951 REQUIEM FOR A NUN, and badly received magnum opus A FABLE in 1954. With THE TOWN (1957) and THE MANSION (1959) Faulkner resumed the story of the Snopes family, which he had begun in 1940 in THE HAMLET. In these final volumes, all the characters are reduced in scale, and only Mink Snopes, in The Mansion, embodies the obsessive self-destructive energy of the family.

With THE REIVERS (1962), set early in the 20th-century, Faulkner nostalgically revisits his childhood, and extends the world of Sanctuary. On June 17, 1962, he was thrown from a horse, and a few weeks later, on July 6, Faulkner died of a coronary occlusion.

For further reading: William Faulkner: His South by R.P. Warren (1951); William Faulkner: A Critical Study by I. Howe (1952); The Literary Career of William Faulkner by J.B. Meriwether (1961); William Faulkner by C. Brooks (1963); A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner by E.L. Volpe (1964); Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by R.P. Warren (1966); Faulkner: A Biography by J.L. Blotner (1974, 2 vols.); William Faulkner by W. Beck (1976); William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond by C. Brooks (1978); William Faulkner, His Life and Work by D. Minter (1980); The Origins of Faulkner's Art by J.L. Sensibar (1984); William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Fiction, ed. by A. Robert Lee (1987); Faulkner's Apocrypha by Joseph R. Urgo (1989); The Feminine and Faulkner by Minrose C. Gwin (1990); Faulkner's Subject by Philip M. Weinstein (1992); Critical Essays on William Faulkner, ed. by Arthur F. Kinney (1996); Existential-Phenomenological Readings on Faulkner by William J. Sowder (1997), Faulkner: Masks and Metaphors by Lothar Honninghausen (1997), Faulkner. The Return of the Repressed by Doreen Fowler (1997); Conversations with William Faulkner, ed. by M. Thomas Inge (1999) - See: publications of Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series: Faulkner and Gender; Faulkner and Psychology; Faulkner and Ideology; Faulkner and the Short Story; Faulkner and Natural World; Faulkner and the Artist; Faulkner in Cultural Context - See also: Ben Hecht, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Chandler, Sherwood Anderson - Note: Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, wrote her thesis at Cornell University on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. - James Hadley Chase based his famous mystery story No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1939) on Faulkner's Sanctuary.

THE MARBLE FAUN, (1924)