William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Falkner was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Mississippi.
Nowadays he is considered to be one of the most important and most famous American authors, so
in the following I will go into detail about his life and career.

William Falkner was born was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He lived
together with his parents Murry Cuthbert Falkner, Maud Butler and his three younger brothers. One
year after his birth, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where his grandfather owned several
businesses, making it easy for his father to find work. When Faulkner started school, his grades were
very good, but they worsened over time, so he had to retry 11th and 12th grade and eventually did
not graduate from high school. In the age of 17 he met his mentor Phil Stone. Stone helped him to
become a write, he was the first person, who recognized his talent and trained him. Faulkner gave
some of his first poems to stone, so that he could publish them, but they got rejected. After his first
few poems when the First World War began, he was not able to fight in the American army because
he was too small, instead he was supposed to fly planes for the British army, but before he could fly,
the war ends. After the world war he just wrote poetry exclusively till 1925, when he published his
first novel “Soldier’s Pay”. His second novel was his first fiction story, Mosquitoes, those first two
novels, got published with the help of Sherwood Anderson, a short story novelist and a mentor for
Faulkner. In 1927 Faulkner wrote his third novel, which was the first of his books that took place in
his fictional County Yoknapatawpha. After a rejection by the publishers Boni & Liveright his novel got
published as “Sartoris” in 1929. In the same year, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham who had two
children from a previous marriage, later Faulkner and Estelle had a daughter Jill, in 1933. After he
published a few short stories and his novel Sanctuary, which was disliked for the perceived criticism
of the South, he bought a house in oxford for his family. 1932, when Faulkner needed money, he
became a Hollywood screenwriter, for a consistent salary, he worked as a Hollywood author till the
1950s. From 1950, where he received his Nobel Prize, to 1953 he had an affair with Else Jonsson, the
widow of a well known journalist. On July 6, 1962, a month after he felt from a horse and got
thrombosis, he died because of a heart attack, in the age of 64.

Over his lifetime, Faulkner received several awards that honored his talent.
In 1949 William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique
contribution to the modern American novel".
1951, after Faulkner had donated his Nobel Prize money, to foundations, like the Oxford Bank or the
Rust college, the government of France made Faulkner a “Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur”.
Faulkner was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes for his novels “A Fable” in 1955 and for “The Reivers” in
1966. He also won the U.S. National Book Award twice, for “A Fable” in 1955 and for “Collected
Stories” in 1951.
Overall, William Faulkner is an important part of American literature, especially since he strongly
influenced the fiction genre.