II.

Life

William Cuthbert Falkner was a Southerner by tradition, birth, and choice. His family had lived in Mississippi since before the Civil War, and he spent most of his life in Oxford, Mississippi, a few miles from his birthplace. Falkner showed early signs of wanting to be a writer but his education was irregular after the fifth grade, and although he attended high school for a period and later took courses at the University of Mississippi, he never earned a degree. Toward the end of World War I (1914-1918), Falkner wanted to join the military in the tradition of his great-grandfather, a colonel in the Confederate Army, but was rejected by the United States Army because he was too short. Undeterred, he added a “u” to the spelling of his last name and passed himself off as English in order to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in Toronto. The war soon ended, however, and he returned to Oxford.

Faulkner took a series of jobs during the early 1920s, including a stint as the postmaster of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, a position from which he was fired in 1924. The same year a friend helped him publish his first book, a volume of poetry called The Marbled Faun. During 1925 he lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he became a friend of the American novelist Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to write fiction. Anderson helped Faulkner find a publisher for his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), about a wounded soldier’s homecoming in a small Southern town. The book received positive reviews and Faulkner had found his life’s work, although financial hardship forced him to continue to take menial jobs for several years thereafter. In 1929 Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham.

Faulkner’s many novels include Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1955), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize, 1963). In awarding him the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature, only the fourth such prize won by an American writer, the committee cited Faulkner’s “powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” He also wrote numerous short stories, many of the best of which were published in book form in Go Down, Moses (1942) and The Collected Stories (1950; Pulitzer Prize, 1951). In-between his fiction works, which until late in his career did not always pay well, Faulkner wrote screenplays for Hollywood; two of his more prominent scripts were for the motion pictures To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), both directed by Howard Hawks.