WILLIAM FAULKNER

(1897-1962)

- Born on September 25, in New Albany, Mississippi.

- Family moved to Oxford, Mississippi (the Jefferson of his novels).

- 1918 – enlisted in the Canadian Royal Flying Corps after being rejected by the U.S.
Army, returning in about a year to Oxford, where he attended the University of
Mississippi for 2 years.
- 1922 – took a position as postmaster at the university.
- 1924 – went to New Orleans with newspaper work in mind. There, he became a friend
of Sherwood Anderson’s, worked in an experimental magazine, publishing verse and
criticism and preparing a collection of poems, The Marble Faun.
- 1925 – left for a six-month tour of Europe.
- 1926 – Soldier’s Pay, his first novel.
- 1929 – Sartoris, the first story set in Yoknapatawpha County, North Mississippi.
“I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about
and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. I created a cosmos of my own.”
 The Sound and the Fury
- 1930 – As I Lay Dying.
- 1932 – Light in August.
- 1936 – Absolom, Absolom!
- 1949 – Faulkner receives the Nobel Prize for Literature.
“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because
he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit
capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to
write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by
reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity
and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be
the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
Speech delivered at Stockholm, December 10, 1950.
- 1954 – A Fable, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a year later.
- 1962 – The Reivers, his last novel, awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction a year later.