William Faulkner
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Chapter 6: Moderns and Contemporaries William Faulkner |
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William Faulkner
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Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, but his parents moved while he was still young to Oxford, home of the University of Mississippi. His father first ran a livery stable and a hardware store and then became business manager at the university. Faulkner grew up among family tales of the South and of the Civil War; many werer centered around his great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Falkner, (Faulkner added the "u" to the family name), who had fought for the Confederacy and after the war had built a railroad from Ripley into Tennessee. His great-grandfather had even written a popular romantic novel, The White Rose of Memphis.
Always more interested in reading than in schooling, Faulkner dropped out of high school after two years and took a job in a bank, hoping to marry his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. In 1918, when Estelle married another man and went to live with him in China, Faulkner joined the Canadian Royal Air Force. The war ended before he had finished his basic training, and he returned to Oxford, where he held a string of miscellaneous jobs, including a three-year stint as postmaster of the university post office. Meanwhile, he was learning to write; The Marble Faun, a collection of poems, appeared in 1924 in a private edition. Part of 1925 was spent in New Orleans, where he met a number of writers, including Sherwood Anderson, who helped him arrange for the publication of his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926). Back in Oxford, Faulkner continued to work at a series of odd jobs while he wrote in the evenings and on weekends. Mosquitoes, a novel about literary life in New Orleans, appeared in 1927, but his third novel, Flags in the Dust, was rejected. Faulkner immediately set to work revising Flags in the Dust and writing a new novel, The Sound and the Fury. The revised Flags in the Dust appeared early in 1929 as Sartoris. The Sound and the Fury appeared later the same year. These two novels marked the end of Faulkner’s apprenticeship and inaugurated the Yoknapatawpha cycle. Estelle Oldham returned to Oxford when her marriage ended in divorce, and she and Faulkner were married in 1929. They bought a rundown antebellum house just outside Oxford and Faulkner worked on it for years with his own hands. During the following twelve years, from 1930 to 1942, Faulkner produced the main body of his Yoknapatawpha series: As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942). These books were highly admired by a small circle of his fellow writers and by foreign readers, especially in France, but popular success escaped him; the lurid Sanctuary was the only one of his novels of the 1930s to succeed commercially. By 1945, Faulkner’s books were out of print, and he had largely given up fiction and was writing for films in Hollywood. The turning point in Faulkner’s reputation came in 1945 with the publication of a collection of excerpts from his work, The Portable Faulkner, edited by the prominent critic Malcolm Cowley. Cowley, in his long introduction, made clear the essential unity of Faulkner’s work and arranged the selections so as to demonstrate the interrelationships among the Yoknapatawpha books. The Portable Faulkner was widely and favorably reviewed, and Faulkner’s publisher responded to public demand by putting his novels back in print. A new novel, Intruder in the Dust, was a popular success in 1948. The following year, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize. His Collected Stories appeared in 1950, A Fable in 1954, and The Town and The Mansion, the concluding volumes of the Snopes trilogy which he had begun with The Hamlet, in 1957 and 1959. His last novel, The Reivers, was published only a month before his death in Oxford in 1962. Author Links
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