Faulkner, William

Faulkner, William, 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) and J. Blotner (2 vol., 1974, repr. 1984); 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).

---

Faulkner, William (Cuthbert)

 orig. William Cuthbert Falkner

(born Sept. 25, 1897, New Albany, Miss., U.S.—died July 6, 1962, Byhalia, Miss.) U.S. writer. Faulkner dropped out of high school and only briefly attended college. He spent most of his life in Oxford, Miss. He is best known for his cycle of works set in fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which becomes an emblem of the American South and its tragic history. His first major novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), was marked by radical technical experimentation, including stream of consciousness. His American reputation, which lagged behind his European reputation, was boosted by As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Go Down, Moses (1942), which contains the story “The Bear.” The Portable Faulkner (1946) finally brought his work into wide circulation, and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. His Collected Stories (1950) won the National Book Award. Both in the U.S. and abroad, especially in Latin America, he was among the most influential writers of the 20th century.

---

Faulkner, William (Cuthbert) (b. Falkner) (1897–1962) writer; born in New Albany, Miss. He lived in nearby Oxford, Miss., nearly all his life, writing, farming, and hunting. The scanty education he had after the tenth grade included fitful attendance at the University of Mississippi after his World War I service with the Canadian Air Force. (The war ended while he was still in training.) A writer from adolescence, he published his first poems in his early twenties, and during the next few years spent time in New Orleans, where he was encouraged by Sherwood Anderson. When his first book of poems, The Marble Faun (1924), was published, he added the "u" to his name. He traveled to Europe later in 1925, before returning to Oxford. His first published novels were Soldier's Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927). The Sound and the Fury (1929) was the first of the complex stream-of-consciousness novels for which he was to become known. In the same year, Sartoris was published, the first of a series of novels centered on the Sartoris family in a fictionalized Oxford. He married Estelle Oldham Franklin in 1929. Over the years he created a historical saga centered on five families in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. His famously complex and difficult prose brought to life characters of the South, by turns degenerate, cruel, and macabre, and a major theme of his work was the toll taken by white Southerners' treatment of African-Americans. Other early fiction included 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). Never that popular, he had to earn money by writing Hollywood screenplays in the 1930s, and, by that time, was known to drink heavily and habitually. By the middle 1940s his critical reputation was in eclipse; his rediscovery as a major writer began with the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946), edited by Malcolm Cowley. Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature; his Collected Stories (1950) won a National Book Award (1951); and A Fable (1954) won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize (1955). He was writer in residence at the University of Virginia (1957; 1958). Later works include The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962). He died of a heart attack in Mississippi.