biography
| name: |
Faulkner, William (Cuthbert)
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originally Falkner
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pronunciation:
[fawkner]
| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1897–1962)
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| biography:
| Writer, born in New Albany, Mississippi, USA. He lived in nearby Oxford, MS nearly all his life, writing, farming, and hunting. The scanty education he had after the tenth grade included fitful attendance at the University of Mississippi after his World War 1 service with the Canadian Air Force. (The war ended while he was still in training.) A writer from adolescence, he published his first poems in his early twenties, and during the next few years spent time in New Orleans, where he was encouraged by Sherwood Anderson. When his first book of poems, The Marble Faun (1924), was published, he added the ‘u’ to his name. He travelled to Europe later in 1925, before returning to Oxford. His first published novels were Soldier's Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927). The Sound and the Fury (1929) was the first of the complex stream-of-consciousness novels for which he was to become known. In the same year, Sartoris was published, the first of a series of novels centred on the Sartoris family in a fictionalized Oxford. He married Estelle Oldham Franklin in 1929. Over the years he created a historical saga centred on five families in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. His famously complex and difficult prose brought to life characters of the South, by turns degenerate, cruel, and macabre, and a major theme of his work was the toll taken by white Southerners' treatment of African-Americans. Other early fiction included As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down Moses (1942). Never very popular, he earned money by writing Hollywood screenplays in the 1930s; by that time, he was known to drink heavily and habitually. By the middle 1940s his critical reputation was in eclipse, and his rediscovery as a major writer began with the publication of The Portable Faulkner (1946), edited by Malcolm Cowley. Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, his Collected Stories (1950) won a National Book Award (1951), and A Fable (1954) won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize (1955). He became writer in residence at the University of Virginia (1957–8). Later works include The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962). He died of a heart attack in Mississippi. |
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