William Cuthbert Faulkner

was born on September 25, 1897 and passed away on July 6, 1962.
And yes, he was 5'51/2" tall (or short?).
Faulkner was a Southern American writer, whose writings were centered around his home state
of Mississippi. He was born in New Albany, Mississippi, moved to Ripley with his family, then
finally Oxford. He never graduated high school, received a D in English, and did not graduate
college. He was self taught..and wrote in his family home amongst his family....
Here are some cool facts and
writings I found in my research:
He had three women in his life;
Maud Butler, his mother; Caroline
Callie Barr, his Mammy; and Estelle
Oldham, his wife. All three women
were highly articulate, imaginative
and creative living women and he
chose to be surrounded by them for
most of his life.

He was an avid hunter, loved bourbon, horses, dogs and flying. Time Magazine wrote,
Faulkner was "a man deeply, almost mystically attached to the land."
Faulkner wrote poems, short stories, novels and later was a screenwriter in Hollywood.
His themes centered on powers of genealogy and kinship and history and memory and
problems of the human heart and conflict in the Deep South ....
The Georgia Review in 2001 wrote...."Faulkner had been struggling to find a language
expressly denied him by family and community, a vocabulary that would bridge the distance
between his feelings for this two mothers....between what he seemed to feel were the
inextricable but waring strands of his own hybrid cultural makeup..." A student at the University
of Virginia, where he was the writer in residence in the late 1950's, asked him why he wrote the
way he did, and he replied that man was "the living sum of his past."
He received a Nobel Peace prize in 1950 and two Pulitzer Prizes 1955 and 1963.
His first book was a book of poetry, Flags in the Dust. He went on to write The Sound and the
Fury, A Rose for Emily, Light of August, and many others.
Faulkner did spend time in Hollywood when he was hired to be a screenwriter. He was
struggling financially at this point, which is why he accepted the job. So in 1932 he went there.
"A rising writer from Mississippi found himself amid the bright lights and dry heat of Tinseltown,
at the start of what would become a lengthy dalliance with the screenwriting biz. In the wild of
LA, Faulkner met movie stars, found a bourbon hut, chased true love and tried to stay sane in a
place very far from home....." Actually when he first arrived, he had to escape to Death Valley
for a few days to clear his head ...of all the Tinsel...

Faulkner was seriously injured in a horse backing riding accident when he was 59, and died of a
heart attack at age 65.