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| William Faulkner |
After celebrating the Festivity of La Mercè, the Patron of Barcelona, during five intensive days, The Grandma is exhausted. Today, she has decided to rest at home and reread one of her favourite writers, William Faulkner, who was born on a day like today in 1897.
The Grandma has invited Jordi Santanyí, her closer friend, to talk about Faulkner, his literature, his ideas, and his influence over the Universal Literature.
William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897-July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi.
Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and a play. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically.
Though his work was published as early as 1919 and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner's renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the only Mississippi-born Nobel winner. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), each won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
In 1998, the Modern
Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list
of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the
list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom,
Absalom! (1936) appears on similar lists.
More information: The William Faulkner Society
Born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, he was the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler. He had three younger brothers. Soon after his first
birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, where his father
Murry worked as the treasurer for the family-owned Gulf & Chicago
Railroad Company.
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| William Faulkner |
Murry hoped to inherit the railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, but John had little confidence in Murry's ability to run a business and sold it for $75,000. Following the sale of the railroad business, Murry proposed a plan to get a new start for his family by moving to Texas and becoming a rancher. Maud disagreed with this proposition, however, and they moved instead to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murry's father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work. Thus, four days prior to William's fifth birthday, the Falkner family settled in Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life.
His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline Callie Barr, the African American nanny who raised him from infancy, crucially influenced the development of Faulkner's artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educating him in visual language.
More information: Writing Cooperative
While Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before sending them to public school and exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens and Grimms' Fairy Tales.
Faulkner's lifelong education by Callie Barr is central to his novels' preoccupations with the politics of sexuality and race.
As a schoolchild, Faulkner had success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and did well through the third and fourth grades. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much quieter and more withdrawn child.
He began to play hooky occasionally and became somewhat indifferent to his schoolwork, instead taking interest in studying the history of Mississippi on his own time beginning in the seventh grade. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh and twelfth grade, never graduating from high school.
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| William Faulkner |
Faulkner spent his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders including those of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family.
Faulkner's grandfather would also tell him of the exploits of William's great-grandfather and namesake, William Clark Falkner, who was a successful businessman, writer, and Civil War hero. Telling stories about Old Colonel, as his family called him, had already become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy. According to one of Faulkner's biographers, by the time William was born, his great-grandfather had been enshrined long since as a household deity.
When he was 17, Faulkner met Phil Stone, who became an important early influence on his writing. Stone was four years his senior and came from one of Oxford's older families; he was passionate about literature and had already earned bachelor's degrees from Yale and the University of Mississippi.
Faulkner also attended the latter, joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and pursued his dream to become a writer. Stone read and was impressed by some of Faulkner's early poetry, becoming one of the first to recognize and encourage Faulkner's talent. Stone mentored the young Faulkner, introducing him to the works of writers such as James Joyce, who influenced Faulkner's own writing.
More information: Writers Write
In his early 20s, Faulkner gave poems and short stories he had written to Stone in hopes of their being published. Stone would in turn send these to publishers, but they were uniformly rejected.
The younger Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of black and white Americans, his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good ol' boys and simpletons.
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| William Faulkner |
Unable to join the
United States Army due to his height (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner enlisted
in a reservist unit of the British Army in Toronto. Despite his claims,
records indicate that Faulkner was never actually a member of the
British Royal Flying Corps and never saw active service during the First
World War.
In 1918, Faulkner's surname went from Falkner to Faulkner. According to one story, a careless typesetter simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of his first book, Faulkner was asked whether he wanted the change. He supposedly replied, Either way suits me.
In adolescence, Faulkner began writing poetry almost exclusively. He did not write his first novel until 1925. His literary influences are deep and wide. He once stated that he modeled his early writing on the Romantic era in late 18th- and early 19th-century England. He attended the University of Mississippi in Oxford, enrolling in 1919, going three semesters before dropping out in November 1920.
Faulkner was able to attend classes at the university because his father had a job there as a business manager. He skipped classes often and received a "D" grade in English. However, some of his poems were published in campus publications.
More information: The Culture Trip
Although Faulkner is identified with Mississippi, he was residing in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay. After being directly influenced by Sherwood Anderson, he made his first attempt at fiction writing. Anderson assisted in the publication of Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes, Faulkner's second novel, set in New Orleans, by recommending them to his publisher.
The miniature house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, is now the site of Faulkner House Books, where it also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.
During the summer of 1927, Faulkner wrote his first novel set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, titled Flags in the Dust. This novel drew heavily on the traditions and history of the South, in which Faulkner had been engrossed in his youth. He was extremely proud of the novel upon its completion and he believed it to be a significant step up from his previous two novels. However, when submitted for publication, it was rejected by the publishers Boni & Liveright.
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| William Faulkner |
Faulkner
was devastated by this rejection, but he eventually allowed his
literary agent, Ben Wasson, to significantly edit the text, and the
novel was published in 1929 as Sartoris.
In the autumn of 1928, just after his 31st birthday, he began working on The Sound and the Fury. He started by writing three short stories about a group of children with the last name Compson, but soon began to feel that the characters he had created might be better suited for a full-length novel. Perhaps as a result of disappointment in the initial rejection of Flags in the Dust, Faulkner had now become indifferent to his publishers and wrote this novel in a much more experimental style.
In describing the writing process for this work, Faulkner would later say, One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher's addresses and book lists. I said to myself, 'Now I can write.'
After its completion, Faulkner insisted that Ben Wasson not do any editing or add any punctuation for clarity.
More information: UVA Magazine
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, Andrew Kuhn serving as best man at the wedding. Estelle brought with her two children from her previous marriage to Cornell Franklin and Faulkner hoped to support his new family as a writer. He began writing As I Lay Dying in 1929 while working night shifts at the University of Mississippi Power House. The novel would be published in 1930.
Beginning in 1930, Faulkner sent out some of his short stories to various national magazines. Several of his stories were published, which brought him enough income to buy a house in Oxford for his family to inhabit, which he named Rowan Oak. He made money on his 1931 novel, Sanctuary, which was widely reviewed and read, but widely disliked for its perceived criticism of the South.
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| William Faulkner |
By 1932, Faulkner was in need of money. He asked Wasson to sell the serialization rights for his newly completed novel, Light in August, to a magazine for $5,000, but none accepted the offer. Then MGM Studios offered Faulkner work as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
Although not an avid moviegoer, he needed the money, and so accepted the job offer and arrived in Culver City, California, in May 1932. There he worked with director Howard Hawks, with whom he quickly developed a friendship, as they both enjoyed drinking and hunting. Howard Hawks' brother, William Hawks, became Faulkner's Hollywood agent. Faulkner would continue to find reliable work as a screenwriter from the 1930s to the 1950s.
Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville from February to June 1957 and again in 1958.
On
June 17, 1962, Faulkner suffered a serious injury in a fall from his
horse, which led to thrombosis. He suffered a fatal heart attack on July
6, 1962, at the age of 64, at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia,
Mississippi.
Faulkner
is buried with his family in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, alongside
the grave of an unidentified family friend, whose stone is marked only
with the initials E.T.
More information: Brain Pickings
From the early 1920s to the outbreak of World War II, Faulkner published 13 novels and many short stories. Such a body of work formed the basis of his reputation and earned him the Nobel Prize at age 52.
Faulkner's prodigious output includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories.
Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for 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.
Faulkner detested the fame and glory that resulted from his recognition. His aversion 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.
He donated part of his Nobel money to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers, eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and donated another part to a local Oxford bank, establishing a scholarship fund to help educate African-American teachers at Rust College in nearby Holly Springs, Mississippi.
More information: Archive
Read, read, read.
Read everything -trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it.
Just like a carpenter who works
as an apprentice and studies the master.
Read! You'll absorb it. Then write.
If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
William Faulkner
