Faulkner, William

(1897-1962)
Intro
 American novelist, known for his epic
portrayal, in some 20 novels, of the tragic
conflict between the old and the new South.
 Faulkner's complex plots and narrative style
alienated many readers of his early works,
but he was recognized later as one of the
greatest American writers.
Early Life
 Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner was
raised in nearby Oxford as the oldest of four sons of
an old-line southern family.
 In 1915 he dropped out of high school, which he
detested, to work in his grandfather's bank. In World
War I (1914-1918) he joined the Royal Canadian Air
Force but never saw battle action.
 Back home in Oxford, he was admitted to the
University of Mississippi as a veteran, but he soon
quit school to write, supporting himself with odd
jobs.
Career
 Faulkner's first book, The Marble Faun, a
collection of pastoral poems, was privately
printed in 1924.
 The following year he moved to New
Orleans, worked as a journalist, and met the
American short-story writer Sherwood
Anderson, who helped him find a publisher
for his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), and
also convinced him to write about the people
and places he knew best.
Works
 After a brief tour of Europe, Faulkner returned home
and began his series of baroque, brooding novels
set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County (based
on Lafayette County, Mississippi), peopling it with
his own ancestors, Native Americans, blacks,
shadowy backwoods hermits, and loutish poor
whites.
 In the first of these novels, Sartoris (1929), he
patterned the character Colonel Sartoris after his
own great-grandfather, William Cuthbert Falkner, a
soldier, politician, railroad builder, and author.
(Faulkner restored the “u” that had been removed
from the family name.)
Intervju with Jean Stein in the Paris Review in the mid-1950s is
his most elaborate and well-known version of the novel's
composition:

 It began with a mental picture. I didn't realize at the time it was symbolical.
The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl's drawers in a pear tree where
she could see through a window where her grandmother's funeral was taking
place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By
the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her
pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short
story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism
of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless
and motherless girl climbing down the rainpipe to escape from the only home
she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or
understanding. I had already begun to tell it through the eyes of the idiot child
sinceI felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of
knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that
time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother.
That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third
brother. That was still not it.
Interview with Jean Stein in the Paris Review in the mid-1950s is
his most elaborate and well-known version of the novel's
composition:

 I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the
spokesman. It was still not complete, not until 15 years after the book was
published when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get
the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it.
It's the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn't leave it alone, and I never
could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I'd
probably fail again.
The Title
 Out, Out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
 Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5
The Sound and the Fury
 The year 1929 was crucial to Faulkner. That year Sartoris
was followed by The Sound and the Fury, an account of the
tragic downfall of the Compson family.
 The novel uses four different narrative voices to
piece together the story and thus challenges the
reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from
multiple points of view.
 The structure of The Sound and the Fury presaged the
narrative innovations Faulkner would explore throughout his
career.
 Also in 1929 Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart,
Estelle Oldham, and made his home in the small town of
Oxford, Mississippi.
Other works
 Most of the books he wrote over the rest of his life received
favorable reviews, but only one, Sanctuary (1931), sold well.
 Despite its sensationalism and brutality, its underlying
concerns were with corruption and disillusionment.
 The book's success led to lucrative work as a scriptwriter for
Hollywood, which, for a short time, freed Faulkner to write his
novels as his imagination dictated.
 Faulkner's two most successful screenplays were written for
movies that were directed by Howard Hawks: To Have and
Have Not (1945, adapted from the novel by the American
writer Ernest Hemingway) and The Big Sleep (1946, adapted
from the novel by the American writer Raymond Chandler).
Style
 Faulkner's works demanded much of
his readers.
 To create a mood, he might let one of
his complex, convoluted sentences run
on for more than a page.
Style
 He juggled time, spliced narratives, experimented with multiple
narrators, and interrupted simple stories with rambling, stream-of-
consciousness soliloquies.
 Consequently, his readership dwindled.
 “Because women so delicate so mysterious Father said.  Delicate
equilibrium of periodical filth between two moons balanced.  Moons
he said full and yellow as harvest moons her hips thighs.  Outside
outside of them always but.  Yellow.  Feet soles with walking like. 
Then know that some man that all those mysterious and imperious
concealed.  With all that inside of them shapes an outward suavity
waiting for a touch to.  Liquid putrefaction like drowned things floating
like pale rubber flabbily filled getting the odor of honeysuckle all
mixed up.”
Malcolm Cowley
 In 1946 the critic Malcolm Cowley,
concerned that Faulkner was insufficiently
known and appreciated, put together The
Portable Faulkner, arranging extracts from
Faulkner's novels into a chronological
sequence that gave the entire
Yoknapatawpha saga a new clarity, thus
making Faulkner's genius accessible to a
new generation of readers.
Recognition
 Faulkner's works, long out of print,
began to be reissued.
 No longer was he regarded as a
regional curiosity, but as a literary
giant whose finest writing held
meaning far beyond the agonies and
conflicts of his own troubled South.
The Nobel Prize
 His accomplishment was internationally recognized in 1949,
when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
 His major works include As I Lay Dying (1930), the story of a
family's journey to bury a mother; Light in August (1932);
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), about Thomas Sutpen's attempt to
found a Southern dynasty; The Unvanquished (1938); The
Hamlet (1940), the first novel in a trilogy about the rise of the
Snopes family; Go Down Moses (1942), a collection of
Yoknapatawpha County stories of which the novella The Bear
is the best known; Intruder in the Dust (1948); A Fable (1954);
The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), which completed
the Snopes trilogy; and The Reivers (1962).
Theme
 Faulkner especially was interested in
multigenerational family chronicles, and
many characters appear in more than one
book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County
saga a sense of continuity that makes the
area and its inhabitants seem real.
 Faulkner continued to write—both novels
and short stories—until his death.
Speech
 In his famous speech upon being awarded
the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, American
novelist William Faulkner charged writers
with the responsibility of chronicling the
human condition and the human spirit.
 In this first sentence of the speech, Faulkner
describes how he regards his own work.
 I feel that this award was not
made to me as a man, but to my
work‘s a life's work in the agony
and sweat of the human spirit, not
for glory and least of all for profit,
but to create out of the materials
of the human spirit something
which did not exist before. So this
award is only mine in trust.