William Faulkner

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Image:William Faulkner 1954 (3) (photo by Carl van Vechten).jpg William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning novelist from Mississippi. Though his works are sometimes considered challenging or even opaque, he is regarded as one of America's most influential fiction writers.

Faulkner was known for using long, serpentine sentences and meticulously chosen diction, in stark contrast to the minimalist style of his longtime rival, Ernest Hemingway. Some consider Faulkner to be the only true American Modernist prose fiction writer of the 1930s, following in the experimental tradition of European writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann. His work is known for literary devices like stream of consciousness, multiple narrations or points of view, and narrative time shifts.

1 Life
2 Works
3 Later years
4 Bibliography
5 External links

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Life

Faulkner was born William Falkner (without "u")<ref>*David Wallechinsky & Amy Wallace: The New Book of Lists, p.5. Canongate, 2005. ISBN 1841957194.</ref> in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in and heavily influenced by that state, as well as by the ambience of the South. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in the history of northern Mississippi who served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, founded a railroad, and gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County. Perhaps most importantly, he wrote several novels and other works, establishing a literary tradition in the family. Eventually, Colonel Falkner became the model for Colonel John Sartoris in his great-grandson's writing.

It is understandable that the younger Falkner was influenced by the history of his family and the region in which they lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of blacks and whites, his keen characterization of usual Southern characters and his timeless themes, one of them being that fiercely intelligent people dwelled behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. The state has also produced a number of other prominent writers and playwrights during the time period. After being snubbed by the United States Army because of his height, Faulkner first joined the Canadian and then the Royal Air Force, yet still did not see any of the World War I wartime action. The definite reason for Faulkner's change in the spelling of his last name is still unknown, but possibilities include adding a "u" 1) to appear more British when entering the Royal Air Force, 2) so his name would come across as more aristocratic, or 3) keeping a misspelling an early editor had made.

Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was living in New Orleans in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay. The small house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, and also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.

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Works

Faulkner's most celebrated novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), The Unvanquished (1938), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was a prolific writer of short stories: his first short story collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A Rose for Emily," "Barn Burning," "Red Leaves," "That Evening Sun," and "Dry September." In 1931 in an effort to make money, Faulkner crafted Sanctuary, a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel. Its themes of evil and corruption (bearing Southern Gothic tones) resonate to this day. A sequel to the book, Requiem for a Nun, is the only play that he published. It includes an introduction that is actually one sentence spanning more than a page. He received a Pulitzer Prize for A Fable, and won National Book Awards for his Collected Stories (1951) and A Fable (1955).

Faulkner was also an acclaimed writer of mysteries, publishing a collection of crime fiction, Knight's Gambit, that featured Gavin Stevens (who also appeared in Light in August, Go Down, Moses, The Town, Intruder in the Dust, and the short story Hog Pawn), an attorney, wise to the ways of folk living in Yoknapatawpha County. He set many of his short stories and novels in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on—and nearly identical to in terms of geography—Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, is the county seat; Yoknapatawpha was his very own "postage stamp" and it is considered to be one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history of literature. His former home in Oxford, Rowan Oak, is operated as a museum by the University of Mississippi.

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Later years

In the later years, Faulkner moved to Hollywood to be a screenwriter (producing scripts for Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, both directed by Howard Hawks). Faulkner started an affair with Hawks' secretary, Meta Carpenter. Faulkner was rather famous for drinking as well, and throughout his life was known to be an alcoholic. The hard-drinking character of Bill Mayhew in the Coen Brothers' movie Barton Fink was almost certainly based on Faulkner.

An apocryphal story regarding Faulkner in his Hollywood period, found him with a case of writer's block at the studio. He told Hawks he was having a hard time concentrating, and would like to write at home. Hawks was agreeable and Faulkner left. Several days passed with no word from the writer. Hawks telephoned Faulkner's hotel and found that Faulkner had checked out several days earlier. It seems Faulkner had been quite literal, and had returned home to Mississippi to finish the screenplay.

According to rumor, Faulkner's alcoholism was particularly drastic after a major accomplishment, when he would go on prolonged binges. Normally during his bouts with drinking he would stay in bed and have various family members bring him his drinks and keep him company. An interesting anecdote describes Faulkner after his winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, where he drank heavily in anticipation of his departure for Stockholm. His nephew brought him a drink and began to talk about his triumphs in a recent football game, which took place on the same day Faulkner was told he had to sail for the prize ceremony. Despite his inebriation, Faulkner put two and two together, realized that a family member had intentionally lied to him about the true date of his Nobel Prize reception in order to ensure his sobriety at the event, and then resumed drinking steadily until the actual date. It is said that his speech was not noted for its greatness until the next day when it appeared in writing, because Mr. Faulkner stood too far from the microphone, mumbled, and spoke with his usual deep Southern drawl, making it almost impossible for those in attendance to hear or understand him. Recordings of the Nobel Prize speech—which appear on "Faulkner Reads" with sections from As I Lay Dying, The Old Man, and A Fable—were recorded in a studio after the actual event. In it he remarked, "I decline to accept the end of man [...] Man will not only endure, but prevail...." Both events were fully in character. Faulkner donated his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers," eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

The text of the Nobel Prize speech is also available on the website of the Nobel Foundation [1], together with a partial audio recording. It is not specified whether this recording is live or if it was later made in a studio, but reverberation, echo, and ambient noises, along with hesitations and mispronunciations, plus minor differences of style with the published text seem to indicate it is indeed live.

Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death in 1962 of a heart attack.

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