William Faulkner - Introduction and Biography

          William Faulkner came from an old southern family.  He was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi but he grew up in Oxford, Mississippi.  He was the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner.  At the age of 13, he began to write poetry.  He played quarterback on a football team and suffered a broken nose at Oxford High School.  Before graduating High School, he dropped out of school and worked temporarily in his grandfather’s bank.  Faulkner joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force during World War I.  He studied at the University of Mississippi but he never graduated from there.  He worked briefly for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper.  He worked on the majority of his novels and short stories on a farm in Oxford.  He did take some trips to Europe and Asia and he had a few brief stays in Hollywood as a screenwriter.  Faulkner created a host of characters typical of the historical growth and later corruption of the South in an attempt to create a legend of his own.  In 1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  His style is not very easy.  He has connections to European modernism.  Faulkner’s sentences are long and hypnotic and sometimes he withholds important details.  He also refers to people or events that the reader will not learn about until much later.  Faulkner failed as a poet during the 1920s because many companies rejected his work.  He has written many novels which have been successful.  His works created some of the most enduring and detailed portraits of life on the American South.  Most of his novels explore family dynamics, race, gender, and social class.  His novels has fascinated and challenged readers for over sixty years with his iconic characters, difficult plotlines, and many shifts in time.  He is known for an experimental style with detailed attention to language and accent.  Faulkner used “stream of consciousness” in his writing.  He often wrote highly emotional, delicate, clever, complicated, and sometimes Gothic or bizarre stories.  He used a wide variety of characters in his stories including slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.  He died on July 6, 1962.                  

"William Faulkner - Biography". Nobelprize.org. 22 Mar 2011 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html