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William Faulkner
1897–1962 · 65 years Tier I
He faked the war wound before he wrote a word worth reading
His great-grandfather and namesake, William Clark Falkner, was a Confederate colonel who was tried twice for murder, acquitted twice, part-owned a railroad, and was shot dead by his partner. Faulkner spent his boyhood in Oxford, Mississippi, listening to that kind of story. He skipped second grade, then stopped trying, repeated the 11th and 12th grades and never graduated. In 1918 Estelle Oldham, whom he had assumed he would marry, accepted somebody else. That July he enlisted in the Royal Air Force in Canada on a forged letter of reference, trained in Toronto, and was discharged in January after 179 days without ever having been in a cockpit. He came home to Mississippi telling war stories and faking a wound.
He built a county. Yoknapatawpha first appeared in a novel his publisher rejected in 1927 and printed in 1929 with a quarter of it cut, as Sartoris. That same year he finished The Sound and the Fury, told his agent not to add so much as a comma for clarity, and gave four narrators four different holds on one collapsing family. He wrote As I Lay Dying on night shifts at the university power plant. Sanctuary he wrote for money. Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! followed. To pay for all of it he went to California and worked on roughly 50 films between 1932 and 1954, among them To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. The Nobel came for 1949, and two Pulitzers and two National Book Awards after that.
In 1931 his first child, a daughter named Alabama, was born and died nine days later. He had bought Rowan Oak the year before and needed money for it ever after. On race he took a position that satisfied nobody and has not aged. He argued against school segregation in Harper's in 1956 and in the same period told civil rights activists to go slow and be more moderate, which James Baldwin read as the fantasy of an educated white Southerner. At a buffet supper he told J. Robert Oppenheimer that television was for Black people, using the slur. Joseph Blotner, his biographer, put it down to boredom in a room he did not want to be in. Ralph Ellison called him the greatest artist the South has produced and thought no American novelist had done more to explore Black character.
By 1946 nearly every one of his novels was out of print. Malcolm Cowley assembled The Portable Faulkner that year and the reputation came back inside a decade, with the Nobel three years later. He fell from a horse on June 17, 1962, developed a thrombosis, and died of a heart attack three weeks later at a sanatorium in Byhalia. Part of the Nobel money went into a fund for first novelists that became the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1981. Rowan Oak passed to the University of Mississippi in 1972 with the outline of A Fable still on the study wall. Abroad he never went out of fashion at all. A 2009 French poll put him second only to Proust.
Lifespan
William Faulkner's life against the full span of the corpus.
Notable works
-
The Sound and the Fury
book
Four narrators, one Compson family, no punctuation added for the reader's comfort 1929 -
As I Lay Dying
book
Written on night shifts at the University of Mississippi power plant 1930 -
Sanctuary
book
Written to sell, and it did 1931 -
Light in August
book
No magazine would pay 5,000 dollars for the serial rights, which sent him to Hollywood 1932 -
Absalom, Absalom!
book
The Sutpen story, told by people who were not there 1936 -
The Reivers
book
His nineteenth and last novel, and his second Pulitzer, awarded after his death 1962
Life in brief
with age at each point- July 10, 1918 aged 20 Enlists in the Royal Air Force in Canada on a forged letter of reference He had been turned down elsewhere and trained only at the Toronto recruit depot.
- January 4, 1919 aged 21 Discharged after 179 days, having never flown He went home and told war stories anyway.
- November 1920 aged 23 Drops out of the University of Mississippi after three semesters He had received a D in English.
- 1925 aged ~28 Writes his first novel in the French Quarter of New Orleans Sherwood Anderson recommended Soldiers' Pay to his own publisher.
- June 1929 aged 31 Marries Estelle Oldham, 11 years after she married someone else She brought two children from the first marriage.
- 1931 aged ~34 His daughter Alabama is born and dies nine days later
- May 1932 aged 34 Arrives in Culver City to write for MGM He announced a wish to work on Mickey Mouse cartoons, not realizing Disney made them.
- December 1950 aged 53 Collects the 1949 Nobel Prize in Stockholm His 17-year-old daughter learned of the award when she was called to the principal's office.
- July 6, 1962 aged 64 Dies at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia He had fallen from a horse three weeks earlier.
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