Faulkner, William

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Faulkner, William

• (1897-1962)

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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.

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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.

4
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.

5
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.)

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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.

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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).

8
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.

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Style

• He juggled time, spliced narratives, experimented
  with multiple narrators, and interrupted simple
  stories with rambling, stream-of-consciousness
  soliloquies.
• Consequently, his readership dwindled.

10
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.

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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.

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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).

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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 writeboth novels and short
  storiesuntil his death.

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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.

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• I feel that this award was not made to me as a
  man, but to my works 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.

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• It will not be difficult to find a dedication for
  the money part of it commensurate with the
  purpose and significance of its origin. But I
  would like to do the same with the acclaim too,
  by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I
  might be listened to by the young men and women
  already dedicated to the same anguish and
  travail, among whom is already that one who will
  some day stand where I am standing.

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• Our tragedy today is a general and universal
  physical fear so long sustained by now that we
  can even bear it. There are no longer problems of
  the spirit. There is only one question When will
  I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or
  woman writing today has forgotten the problems of
  the human heart in conflict with itself which
  alone can make good writing because only that is
  worth writing about, worth the agony and the
  sweat.

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• He must learn them again. He must teach himself
  that the basest of all things is to be afraid
  and, teaching himself that, forget it forever,
  leaving no room in his workshop for anything but
  the old verities and truths of the heart, the
  universal truths lacking which any story is
  ephemeral and doomed ?love and honor and pity and
  pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does
  so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of
  love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody
  loses anything of value, of victories without
  hope and, worst of all, without pity or
  compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal
  bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the
  heart but of the glands.

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• Until he learns these things, he will write as
  though he stood among and watched the end of man.
  I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy
  enough to say that man is immortal simply because
  he will endure that when the last ding-dong of
  doom has clanged and faded from the last
  worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red
  and dying evening, that even then there will
  still be one more sound that of his puny
  inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to
  accept this. I believe that man will not merely
  endure he will prevail.

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• 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.

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  bel.html