William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/;[1][2] September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American literature, and is widely considered one of the best writers of Southern literature.
Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner's family moved to Oxford, Mississippi when he was a young child. With the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but he did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He then moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925). Returning to Oxford, he wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work which is set in Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Seeking greater economic success, he went to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter.
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 laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[3] His economic success allowed him to purchase an estate in Oxford, Rowan Oak. Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6, 1962 related to a fall from his horse the prior month.
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.
William Cuthbert Falkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi,[4] the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 16, 1960).[5] His family was upper middle-class, "not quite of the old feudal cotton aristocracy".[6] Soon after his first birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, where his father worked as the treasurer for the family-owned Gulf & Chicago Railroad Company.[7] 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. Following the sale of the railroad business, Murry proposed a plan to get a new start for his family by moving to Texas to become a rancher. Maud disagreed with this proposition,[8] and they moved instead to Oxford, Mississippi in 1902,[9] where Murry's father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work.[10] 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.[5][11] After 15 years in Oxford, Faulkner's father became the business manager of the University of Mississippi.[12]
His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline "Callie" Barr (the African American nanny who raised him from infancy) influenced the development of Falkner's artistic imagination. Both his mother and his grandmother were avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. 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 she sent them to public school and she also exposed them to literary classics such as the works of Charles Dickens and the Grimms' Fairy Tales.[10]
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