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William Faulkner
William Faulkner never finished high school, yet he would become the architect of a fictional universe so vast it rivaled the history of the South itself. Born on the 25th of September 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, he was the first of four sons to Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. His family occupied a precarious position in the social hierarchy, described as upper middle-class but not quite part of the old feudal cotton aristocracy that dominated the region. The family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in 1902, where his father established a livery stable and hardware store before eventually becoming the business manager for the University of Mississippi. Except for brief periods elsewhere, Faulkner lived in Oxford for the rest of his life, grounding his entire literary career in the soil of his hometown.
His childhood was a study in contrasts. Initially excelling in school and skipping the second grade, he became a quieter and more withdrawn child by the fourth and fifth grades. He occasionally played truant and grew indifferent to schoolwork, preferring to study the history of Mississippi instead. This decline continued until he wound up repeating the eleventh and twelfth grades, never graduating from high school. During his adolescence, he dated Estelle Oldham, the popular daughter of Major Lemuel and Lida Oldham, and believed he would marry her. However, Estelle dated other boys during their romance, and in 1918, Cornell Franklin, five years his senior, proposed to her before Faulkner did. She accepted, leaving Faulkner to navigate a heartbreak that would echo through his early poetry and novels.
The shadow of his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, loomed large over his imagination. The elder Falkner was a near legendary figure in North Mississippi, born into poverty who rose to become a Confederate colonel, a member of the Mississippi House, and a part-owner of a railroad. He was a strict disciplinarian who was tried and acquitted twice on charges of murder before being murdered himself by a co-owner. Faulkner incorporated many aspects of his great-grandfather's biography into his later works, weaving the family's violent and ambitious history into the fabric of his fiction. This personal history, combined with the stories told to him by elders about the Civil War, slavery, and the Ku Klux Klan, formed the bedrock of his worldview and his characterization of Southern characters.
The Phantom Pilot And The Name Change
In the summer of 1918, William Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Air Force (Canada) as a Private, yet he never saw active service overseas or received cockpit training. Accounts vary regarding his rejection from the US Army, with some suggesting he was turned away for being underweight and standing only five feet five inches tall, while others claim these stories are false. Regardless of the truth, Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force with a forged letter of reference and left Yale to receive training in Toronto. He was discharged on the 4th of January 1919, having served 179 days, but he returned to Oxford telling acquaintances false war stories and even faking a war wound to maintain the persona of a combat veteran. This fabrication became a lifelong habit, a way to elevate his status in a small town that valued military service above all else.
During this same period, his surname underwent a transformation that would define his public identity. In 1918, the family name changed from Falkner to Faulkner. According to one story, a careless typesetter made an error on the title page of his first book. When asked whether he wanted the change, he supposedly replied, Either way suits me. His 1918 Attestation Papers for the Royal Air Force (Canada) note his name as Faulkner, cementing the spelling that would appear on every subsequent page of his career. This shift coincided with his decision to abandon poetry for prose, a transition that began in earnest during his time in New Orleans.
After dropping out of the University of Mississippi in November 1920 after three semesters, Faulkner took a series of odd jobs to support himself. He worked at a New York City bookstore, as a carpenter in Oxford, and as the postmaster at the University of Mississippi. His tenure as postmaster ended with a declaration of independence from the demands of the postal system. He resigned with the statement, 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 defiance of authority and his refusal to be bound by conventional expectations would become hallmarks of his personality, even as he struggled to find a publisher for his early works.
Common questions
When was William Faulkner born and where did he live for most of his life?
William Faulkner was born on the 25th of September 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. He lived in Oxford, Mississippi, for the rest of his life after his family moved there in 1902.
Why did William Faulkner change his surname from Falkner to Faulkner?
William Faulkner changed his surname from Falkner to Faulkner in 1918. The change was cemented by his 1918 Attestation Papers for the Royal Air Force (Canada) and reportedly began with a typesetter error on the title page of his first book.
What happened during William Faulkner's time in Hollywood between 1932 and 1954?
William Faulkner worked on around 50 films in Hollywood from 1932 to 1954 to earn a consistent salary. He wrote screenplays for films such as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep while living a vagrant lifestyle in hotels like the Garden of Allah Hotel.
When did William Faulkner receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and what did he do with the money?
William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and received it at a banquet in Stockholm in December 1950. He donated part of his Nobel money to establish the William Faulkner Foundation to support new fiction writers.
How did William Faulkner die and what was his final novel?
William Faulkner died of a fatal heart attack on the 6th of July 1962 at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi. His final novel, The Reivers, was published in 1962 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In the autumn of 1928, just after his 31st birthday, Faulkner began working on The Sound and the Fury, a novel that would redefine American literature. He started by writing three short stories about a group of children with the last name Compson, but soon felt that the characters he had created were better suited for a full-length novel. Perhaps as a result of the disappointment in the initial rejection of his earlier novel, Flags in the Dust, Faulkner had now become indifferent to his publishers. He wrote this novel in a much more experimental style, insisting that his agent, Ben Wasson, not do any editing or add any punctuation for clarity. He later described the process as shutting the door between him and all publisher's addresses and book lists, declaring, Now I can write.
The novel was published in 1929, followed by As I Lay Dying in 1930, which he wrote while working night shifts at the University of Mississippi Power House. These works marked a departure from the style of his contemporaries like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who often wrote in a minimalist manner. Faulkner made frequent use of stream of consciousness, writing highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories. The opening of The Sound and the Fury is told from the perspective of the intellectually disabled Benjy Compson, a technique that challenged readers to engage with the text on a deeper, more intuitive level. The title itself comes from Macbeth's soliloquy, it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing, a line that encapsulates the futility and tragedy that permeate his work.
Faulkner's relationship with his publishers was often fraught with tension. When he submitted Flags in the Dust to Boni & Liveright, it was rejected. He was devastated by this rejection but eventually allowed his literary agent to edit the text, and the novel was published in 1929 as Sartoris. The work was notable in that it was his first novel that dealt with the Civil War rather than the contemporary emphasis on World War I and its legacy. Almost a third of the original manuscript had been cut by Wasson to meet the demands of publishers Harcourt, Brace. Decades later, scholars would work to restore the text, reinstating cut passages and including added sections from the published text, eventually creating a definitive version that restored Faulkner's original title, Flags in the Dust.
Hollywood And The Screenwriter
By 1932, Faulkner was in dire need of money and had no idea how to get it, so he went to Hollywood. He arrived in Culver City, California, in May 1932, beginning a sporadic relationship with moviemaking that would last until 1954. He was not an avid moviegoer and had reservations about working in the industry, yet he endured the grind to earn a consistent salary that supported his family back home. Initially, he declared a desire to work on Mickey Mouse cartoons, not realizing that they were produced by Walt Disney Productions and not MGM. His first screenplay was for Today We Live, an adaptation of his short story Turnabout, which received a mixed response. He then wrote a screen adaptation of Sartoris that was never produced.
From 1932 to 1954, Faulkner worked on around 50 films, often in a state of creative frustration. He wrote letters that were scathing in tone, painting a miserable portrait of a literary artist imprisoned in a cultural Babylon. In Hollywood, he worked with director Howard Hawks, with whom he quickly developed a friendship, as they both enjoyed drinking and hunting. Hawks' brother, William Hawks, became Faulkner's Hollywood agent. While staying in Hollywood, Faulkner adopted a vagrant lifestyle, living in brief stints in hotels like the Garden of Allah Hotel and frequenting the bar at the Roosevelt Hotel and the Musso & Frank Grill. He was said to have regularly gone behind the bar to mix his own Mint Juleps and had an extramarital affair with Hawks' secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter.
Despite his disdain for the industry, Faulkner produced some of the most enduring screenplays of the era. In early 1944, he wrote a screenplay adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not. The film was the first starring Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart. Bogart and Bacall would also star in Hawks's The Big Sleep, another film Faulkner worked on. The former film, adapted from Hemingway's novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates, a unique distinction in cinema history. Faulkner's time in Hollywood drained his enthusiasm for writing, and he described the war as bad for writing, yet it provided the financial stability that allowed him to continue his literary work in Oxford.
The Nobel And The Paradox
In 1949, William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 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. When Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize, he met Else Jonsson, the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson. Jonsson, a reporter for Dagens Nyheter from 1943 to 1946, had interviewed Faulkner in 1946 and introduced his works to Swedish readers. Faulkner and Else had an affair that lasted until the end of 1953. At the banquet where they met in 1950, publisher Tor Bonnier introduced Else as the widow of the man responsible for Faulkner winning the Nobel Prize.
Faulkner's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech on the immortality of the artists, although brief, contained a number of allusions and references to other literary works. He began by saying, I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. He donated part of his Nobel money to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers, eventually resulting in the William Faulkner Foundation. His aversion to fame 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.
Controversially, he is noted to have once stated, Television is for niggers, a remark that reflects the complex and often contradictory nature of his views on race. While he advocated a gradual abolition of racial segregation and made racial prejudices the subject of a number of his works including Intruder in the Dust, he was critical of forced or fast-moving desegregation. He argued that civil rights activists should go slow and be more moderate in their positions. The essayist and novelist James Baldwin was highly critical of Faulkner's views around integration, seeing him as part of a group of educated white Southerners who falsely believed that there could be a middle ground between segregationists and integrationists. Yet, Ralph Ellison said that No one in American fiction has done so much to explore the types of Negro personality as has Faulkner.
The Fall And The Final Novel
On the 17th of June 1962, Faulkner suffered a serious injury in a fall from his horse, which led to thrombosis. He suffered a fatal heart attack on the 6th of July 1962, at the age of 64, at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi. He is buried with his family in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford. The fall from his horse was not an isolated incident; during the writing of his final novel, The Reivers, he injured himself in a series of falls. The novel, begun in 1961, is a nostalgic reminiscence in which an elderly grandfather relates a humorous episode in which he and two boys stole a car to drive to a Memphis bordello. In summer 1961, he finished the first draft, completing his nineteenth and final novel.
The Reivers was published in 1962, the same year he died, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Two of his works, A Fable and The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, cementing his legacy as a master of the American novel. A Fable, published over a decade after he began work on it in 1943, merged World War I's Unknown Soldier with the Passion of Christ. The award for A Fable was a controversial political choice. The jury had selected Milton Lott's The Last Hunt for the prize, but Pulitzer Prize Administrator Professor John Hohenberg convinced the Pulitzer board that Faulkner was long overdue for the award, despite A Fable being a lesser work of his, and the board overrode the jury's selection, much to the disgust of its members.
Faulkner's death marked the end of an era, but his influence continued to grow. His works have been adapted into films, though they have received a polarized response, with many critics contending that Faulkner's works are unfilmable. His final work, The Reivers, was adapted into a 1969 film starring Steve McQueen. Tommy Lee Jones's neo-Western film The Three Burials of Melquiades Estada was partly based on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. The United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in his honor on the 3rd of August 1987, and a Mississippi Writers Trail historical marker was installed at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mississippi, on the 10th of October 2019, honoring his contributions to the American literary landscape.