FREE ESSAY ON WILLIAM FAULKNER

WILLIAM FAULKNER

Faulkner, William (1897-1962), 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.
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.
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. 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.)
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. 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).
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. He juggled time, spliced
narratives, experimented with multiple narrators, and interrupted simple stories with
rambling, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies. Consequently, his readership dwindled. 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.
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. 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 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). 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.
Bibliography
Faulkner, William, Microsoft? Encarta? Encyclopedia 99. ? 1993-1998 Microsoft
Corporation.