William Faulkner
(1897–1962)
William Faulkner once said in an interview that in writing his novel Sartoris he became aware of his true subject: He would focus on a small segment of the world in his native South and could find there enough to write about for the rest of his life. The fictional cosmos Faulkner created is Yoknapatawpha County, and it does have a reality of its own. Most students of Faulkner know, for example, that it is in northern Mississippi, that it consists of 2,400 square miles and some 15,000 persons, and that the county seat is Jefferson. Faulkner has charged what happens there with a significance that only literature can infuse. Slowly, with the appearance of each novel and story, he filled in the history of the county. This is also the history of a society, the decisions it faces, the directions in which it is drawn, and its effort to maintain its traditions and its code of honor.
William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi. After the fifth grade, Faulkner attended school only occasionally, but he read a good deal—especially French and modern English poetry—and took several courses at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford. During World War I he went to Canada and joined the Royal Flying Corps, in which he was made a lieutenant. After the Armistice he returned to Oxford and entered the university, where he attended classes on and off for two years.
In December 1924 Faulkner went to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel, Soldier’s Pay. He met Sherwood Anderson, who agreed to recommend it to a publisher. In 1925 Faulkner returned to Oxford, Mississippi. He moved into an old house that he renovated himself, and lived there most of the rest of his life.
Once back home, Faulkner began to write the novels and short stories that many critics regard as among the most important by an American writer of the twentieth century. His first notable work, The Sound and the Fury, appeared in 1929. The opening portion is told through Benjy, a young man with mental retardation who lacks all sense of time and constantly jumbles together the past and the present. Only in the final section does Faulkner show the balanced, lucid style he uses when he feels it is appropriate to his subject. Many of Faulkner’s works make similar demands on the reader, but these demands are rarely unreasonable. The involved syntax, the sudden shifts in time and subject matter, and the frequent use of symbols reflect the dark, confused emotions of his characters and the growing disorder that surrounds them. Only a few of the characters manage to escape disorder by following simple, natural occupations—farming and hunting—and by respecting the life-giving soil, the wilderness, and all living things. Other important works include As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses.
In the thirties and early forties, Faulkner was regarded primarily as an eccentric writer who might possibly occupy a minor place in American literature. By 1945 his novels were nearly out of print. Only gradually was he recognized as a major writer. Critics such as Robert Penn Warren and Malcolm Cowley wrote essays that penetrated his surface oddities to discover his underlying greatness: an intense concern with issues not simply peculiar to the South but involving all humanity. The violent and insane consequences of race and money in Faulkner’s South become in his fiction a history of the entire United States, which, in turn, is a history of the fallen human race. The Fall in Faulkner is defined as the bartering away of humanity’s identity as a natural species observing humility as well as bravery, pride, honor, pity, a sense of justice, and a belief in liberty, in the harsh and prehistoric conditions of the hunt for "town" identities based artificially on race, money, and respectability. Faulkner’s greatness is also evident in a tremendous variety of stories and situations, ranging from earthy comedy to deep tragedy; and in an enormous power of expression. Before his death Faulkner was regarded by many as the greatest living American novelist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949.
