William Faulkner

• 1. Introduction

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  William Faulkner spent most of his writing life within a few square miles of Lafayette County, Mississippi, yet the fictional world he built from that patch of earth would reshape literature across three continents. He was born on the 25th of September, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and he died on the 6th of July, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi. Between those two dates, he published thirteen novels and scores of short stories, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and invented Yoknapatawpha County, a place critics have called one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history of literature.

  He was also, at various points, a high school dropout, a forger of military documents, a postmaster who resigned in fury, a Hollywood screenwriter who mixed his own Mint Juleps behind a hotel bar, and a man who hid from his 17-year-old daughter the news that he had just won the world's most famous literary prize. How did someone so rooted in one corner of the American South become, in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, a god to young people in France? And why were most of his novels out of print by the time the Nobel committee finally called his name?

• 2. The Making of a Writer

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  Phil Stone walked into William Faulkner's life when Faulkner was seventeen, and Stone would prove decisive. Four years older, Stone came from one of Oxford's established families and held bachelor's degrees from Yale and the University of Mississippi. He read Faulkner's early poetry and recognized something in it that everyone else had missed. Stone mentored the young writer, introduced him to James Joyce, and later sent Faulkner's poems and short stories to publishers on his behalf. Every submission came back rejected.

  Faulkner's formal education had already collapsed well before Stone arrived. He had skipped the second grade as a child, then gradually withdrawn from school. He repeated the eleventh and twelfth grades and never received a high school diploma. At the University of Mississippi, where he enrolled in 1919, he skipped classes so regularly that he received a D in English before dropping out after three semesters in November 1920. His postmaster job ended in a resignation letter that has since become one of the more celebrated pieces of American professional correspondence: "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."

  His great-grandfather William Clark Falkner haunted the family stories Faulkner absorbed as a child. The elder Falkner was born into poverty, became a Confederate colonel, was tried and acquitted twice on murder charges, entered the Mississippi House, became part-owner of a railroad, and was eventually murdered by a business partner. Faulkner later wove many elements of this biography directly into his fiction, and the surname itself changed in 1918, reportedly because a typesetter misread the family name. Asked whether he wanted the correction, the young writer reportedly replied: "Either way suits me."

• 3. War Stories and False Wounds

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  In July 1918, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Toronto as Private (II Class), No. 173799. He had joined with a forged letter of reference, having been rejected by the US Army. Accounts of why he was initially turned away differ, but some state that he was considered too short at five feet five inches and underweight. He trained at the recruit depot in Toronto for 179 days and was discharged on the 4th of January, 1919, after the war ended, having never served overseas and never seen combat.

  Despite claiming in letters that he had received cockpit training and flown, Faulkner did neither. Returning to Oxford in December 1918, he told acquaintances fabricated war stories and even faked a wound. The man who would spend his career dissecting the myths and masks of Southern identity was himself performing a fiction about his own military record. This willingness to construct a self-flattering story, and this familiarity with the way lies take on weight through repetition, runs directly beneath the surface of his most ambitious novels.

  In spring 1918, before the enlisting, Faulkner had traveled to New Haven to stay with Phil Stone near Yale. Through Stone he met Sherwood Anderson, Robert Frost, and Ezra Pound. These connections would matter. Anderson later assisted in the publication of Faulkner's first two novels. The circle Faulkner entered through Stone's patronage gave his talent an audience even before his fiction found one.

• 4. New Orleans and the Pivot to Prose

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  March 1925 found Faulkner living in the French Quarter of New Orleans, in the miniature house at 624 Pirate's Alley, around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral. New Orleans in that period drew bohemian artists and writers, and Faulkner found in that environment the push he needed. His attention shifted from poetry to prose, and his style moved from Victorian to modernist during those months.

  The Times-Picayune published several of his short prose works that year. Sherwood Anderson's influence pushed Faulkner toward his first novel, Soldiers' Pay. Anderson also opened the door to publication by recommending it and Faulkner's second novel, Mosquitoes, to his own publisher. Both early novels were written in a style critics compared to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, at times borrowing phrases so directly that the resemblance bordered on appropriation.

  The real shift came in the summer of 1927 when Faulkner sat down to write Flags in the Dust, his first novel set in Yoknapatawpha County. He was deeply proud of it. When the publisher Boni and Liveright rejected it, Faulkner was devastated. He eventually allowed his literary agent Ben Wasson to cut the manuscript to meet the demands of Harcourt, Brace. The version published in 1929 as Sartoris had nearly a fourth of the original text removed. Faulkner's daughter Jill would later approach University of Virginia professor Douglas Day about restoring the manuscript. Day's 1973 edition reinstated the cut passages and returned the original title, Flags in the Dust. A subsequent edition by Noel Polk has since replaced Day's and is considered the definitive text by Random House.

• 5. The Sound and the Fury

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  In the autumn of 1928, just past his thirty-first birthday, Faulkner described a kind of liberation. "One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher's addresses and book lists," he later recalled. "I said to myself, 'Now I can write.'" The novel that followed was The Sound and the Fury. He had begun with three short stories about a family named Compson and discovered the material demanded a full novel.

  The rejection of Flags in the Dust had made him indifferent to commercial expectations, and the new novel was deliberately experimental. He wrote it for himself. After completing it, he told Wasson to leave the text untouched, with no editing and no punctuation added for clarity. The opening section is narrated from the perspective of Benjy Compson, a character with an intellectual disability. The title comes from Macbeth's soliloquy: "it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

  He wrote As I Lay Dying next, beginning it in 1929 while working night shifts at the University of Mississippi Power House. That title arrived from Homer's Odyssey, from the words Agamemnon speaks in the past tense; Faulkner's novel responds to the original by narrating in the present tense. The novel was published in 1930. These two works, produced in rapid succession and each formally radical, would eventually form the core of his reputation, though that reputation had not yet solidified. By 1929, he also married Estelle Oldham, the woman he had hoped to marry years earlier, before Cornell Franklin proposed to her first. Andrew Kuhn served as best man.

• 6. Hollywood and Hard Years

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  MGM Studios offered Faulkner screenwriting work in 1932, and he took it out of financial need. He arrived in Culver City, California, in May of that year. He was not a regular filmgoer and had reservations about the industry. André Bleikasten summarized the situation plainly: Faulkner "was in dire need of money and had no idea how to get it. So he went to Hollywood."

  His first morning in Hollywood, he reportedly told his supervisors he wanted to work on Mickey Mouse cartoons, not realizing those were produced by Walt Disney Productions rather than MGM. His actual first screenplay was Today We Live, an adaptation of his own short story "Turnabout". From 1932 to 1954, he worked on around fifty films. He collaborated with director Howard Hawks, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for drinking and hunting. Hawks's brother William became Faulkner's Hollywood agent. Faulkner also had an extramarital affair with Hawks's secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter.

  The screenplay he wrote for To Have and Have Not, in early 1944, was an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel and was the first film to pair Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Because Faulkner adapted Hemingway's work, To Have and Have Not is the only film with contributions by two Nobel Prize laureates. The letters Faulkner sent from Hollywood during this period were, by his own biographer's account, scathing, painting a picture of a literary artist imprisoned in what he called a cultural Babylon. The Garden of Allah Hotel and the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel and Musso and Frank Grill were among his regular stops. His novel A Fable, begun in 1943 during the second war, merged the story of the First World War's Unknown Soldier with the Passion of Christ. When it won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize, it was a controversial choice: the jury had originally selected Milton Lott's The Last Hunt, but Pulitzer Prize Administrator Professor John Hohenberg convinced the board that Faulkner was overdue for recognition, and the board overrode the jury's decision.

• 7. Nobel and Late Recognition

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  By 1946, the year Malcolm Cowley assembled The Portable Faulkner, most of Faulkner's novels had gone out of print. Cowley's anthology, and the critical reassessment it prompted, rebuilt Faulkner's reputation. Three years later, the Nobel committee awarded him the 1949 Prize in Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." He was the only Nobel laureate born in Mississippi.

  When Faulkner traveled to Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the prize, he met Else Jonsson, born in 1912, the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson. Thorsten had interviewed Faulkner in 1946 as a reporter for Dagens Nyheter and had introduced Faulkner's work to Swedish readers. Publisher Tor Bonnier introduced Else at the banquet as the widow of the man responsible for Faulkner winning the Nobel Prize. Faulkner and Else had an affair that continued until the end of 1953.

  His daughter Jill was seventeen when the Nobel Prize was announced. She learned of it not from her father, but when she was called to the principal's office during the school day. In his acceptance speech, Faulkner said the award was not made to him as a man but to his work, "a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit." He donated part of the prize money to establish a fund for new fiction writers, which eventually became the William Faulkner Foundation, operating from 1960 to 1970. Awards given through the Foundation later became the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, founded by Mary Lee Settle among others, beginning in 1981.

• 8. Legacy Across Borders

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  During the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, German authorities banned American literature. A black market in American books formed, and reading Hemingway or Faulkner became an act of resistance. France never reversed that attachment. A 2009 poll found Faulkner the second most popular writer in France, trailing only Marcel Proust. Albert Camus adapted Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun for the stage, and in Jean-Luc Godard's film Breathless, the character Patricia, played by Jean Seberg, quotes The Wild Palms: "Between grief and nothing, I will take grief."

  Critic and translator Valerie Miles has identified Faulkner's reach into Latin American fiction as considerable. The fictional worlds of Gabriel García Márquez and Juan Carlos Onetti are, in her account, very much in the vein of Yoknapatawpha, and Carlos Fuentes's The Death of Artemio Cruz could not have existed without As I Lay Dying. Jorge Luis Borges is credited with translating The Wild Palms into Spanish, though scholar Douglas Day raises the possibility that Borges' mother may have done the translation. Day also argues that Borges' deep study of The Wild Palms may have pushed him to abandon the novel as his own form.

  Flannery O'Connor captured the pressure Faulkner applied to other Southern writers: "Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down." In 1943, while working at Warner Brothers, Faulkner had written a letter of encouragement to a young Mississippi writer named Eudora Welty. Ralph Ellison called him "the greatest artist the South has produced." Faulkner's manuscripts, correspondence, and personal library reside at the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, including the walls of his small study at Rowan Oak, where he had written the day-by-day plot outline for A Fable directly onto the plaster.