Nobel Prize for literature 1949
Pulitzer Prize 1955 for "A Fable"
Pulitzer Prize 1963 for "The Reivers"
"The Sound and The Fury" 1929
"Sartoris" 1929
"As I Lay Dying" 1930
"Light In August" 1932
"Absalom, Absalom!" 1936
"The Unvanquished" 1938
"The Hamlet" 1940
"Go Down Moses" 1942
"Requiem For A Nun" 1951
"A Fable" 1954
"The Town" 1957
"The Mansion" 1959
"The Reivers" 1963

William Cuthbert Faulkner, b. New Albany, Miss., Sept. 25, 1897, d. July 6, 1962, was one of America's most innovative novelists. He lived most of his life in Oxford, Miss., and his works combine regional traditions and culture with masterly characterization and technical experimentation.

In a career lasting more than three decades, Faulkner published 19 novels, more than 80 short stories, 2 books of poems, and numerous essays. Like Thomas Mann and James Joyce, writers he greatly admired, Faulkner depicted ordinary society in terms of ageless human dramas.

Early Life and Works

Faulkner's principal setting is Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional domain loosely based upon places and subjects near to him in his youth. His family had played a significant role in Mississippi history. His great-grandfather, the model for the senior John Sartoris of several novels, was a lawyer, soldier, painter, railroad builder, poet, and novelist and was twice acquitted of murder charges. Faulkner grew up surrounded by traditional lore--family and regional stories, rural folk wisdom and humor, heroic and tragic accounts of the Civil War, and tales of the hunting code and the Southern gentleman's ideal of conduct. In his lifetime and in his works Faulkner bore witness to great political, economic, and social changes in the life of the South.

Although Oxford, Miss., was in some ways rural, it was also the seat of the state university, the county government, and the federal district court, and it had ties to major cultural centers. A voracious reader, more schooled than he would ever admit, Faulkner began writing in his early teens. As a young man he produced hand-lettered and hand-illustrated books for his friends, including books of poems, at least one esoteric play, an allegorical story, and a children's tale. These works show his early commitment to a writer's life.

Faulkner's early years were not confined to the countryside that he eventually shaped into Yoknapatawpha. Before the 1918 armistice, he trained in Toronto as a fighter pilot with the Royal Air Force. He traveled to New York City, New Orleans, and Europe. He read and wrote, absorbing the modernist influences that were changing the face of 20th-century art. In the mid-1920s, Faulkner lived among writers and artists in the French Quarter of New Orleans and received encouragement for his fiction, most notably from Sherwood Anderson. He had come to New Orleans with a book of poems to his credit, The Marble Faun (1924) and there completed his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), about the homecoming of a fatally wounded aviator.

The Mature Years

After travel abroad and the publication of his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), about bohemian life in New Orleans, Faulkner returned to Oxford, Miss., apparently on Anderson's advice, to begin a remarkable decade of writing. Sartoris (1929) was his first major exploration of Yoknapatawpha County, what he called his "little postage stamp of native soil," and he exploited it fictionally during the following 24 years, with occasional side trips.

Faulkner's next novel, The Sound and the Fury (1929), displayed startling progress. It showed that he had mastered his material, demonstrated a rich variety of styles, and brought to bear techniques and ideas then pervasive in literature and art. Established as an author, Faulkner continued to write novels, always experimenting with new forms. As I Lay Dying (1930) was a tour de force in stream of consciousness. It was followed by the lurid, and some would say prosaic, Sanctuary (1931), with themes of murder, rape, and degradation. Subsequent works included the tightly knit novel Light in August (1932), the monumentally complex narrative Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and the episodic Go Down, Moses (1942), containing his most famous short piece, The Bear. A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962) each won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but Faulkner's later novels were less successful.

Faulkner set ambitious goals for himself and often considered his books failures. Others thought differently, however. Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature. A humanist, he repeatedly explored the question of human freedom and the obstacles to it--racism, regimentation, shame, fear, pride, and overly abstract principles. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner summed up a lifetime of writing: "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."

William Faulkner is considered by many to be the greatest American writer of the 20th Century. His honors included the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for "A Fable." His other novels include "The Sound and the Fury," "As I Lay Dying," "Sanctuary" and "Absalom, Absalom!"

William Faulkner was injured 17 June 1962 in a fall from a horse. He entered a hospital at Byhalia, Mississippi 5 July 1962 and died early 6 July after a heart attack. He is buried at St. Peter's Cemetery at Oxford, Mississippi.

When World War I broke out, Faulkner was rejected for military service because he was only 5 feet 5 inches tall. He claimed British citizenship and enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air force. On his appliation to the RCAF, he added a "u" to his last name, as J. Peder Zane said, "for reasons that are not precisely clear but that signaled his desire to forge a new identity, though one not too far removed from his old self." Zane said that, although Faulkner did not see combat, he returned to Oxford in 1918 wearing his officer's uniform and carrying a swagger stick. "Years after he had established his reputation as a writer," Zane wrote, "he was still telling people he had been a flying ace, severely wounded so that he had a silver plate in his head."



He rode his horse through Bailey's Woods and walked the roads to the courthouse square. He squirmed in the pews of St. Peter's church and sat bored in the classrooms of Ole Miss.

He lived in the white, columned house he named Rowan Oak, where the front walk is lined by lonely cedars and the small, tattered barn looks untouched since the Nobel laureate died 35 years ago.

Like Civil War battle sites, Faulkner landmarks are everywhere. That red-shuttered mansion near the square, experts will tell you, was the model for the Compson home in ''The Sound and the Fury.'' A grassy ditch became a hiding spot for Joe Christmas in ''Light in August.'' A gray frame house turned up in the great short story ''A Rose for Emily.''

But this is not the place Faulkner knew and wrote about. Once a rural, segregated community, Oxford is now a modern college town, where students, black and white, use ATM machines on campus and drink cappuccino on the square.

''It's a lot easier to talk about what's changed than what's stayed the same,'' Oxford-based writer Barry Hannah says as he drives along a well-paved highway.

''The small farmer that's talked about all the time has just about vanished. You couldn't have 'As I Lay Dying,' a country family bringing back their mother in a wooden box to bury her in her own city. That just wouldn't happen.''

William Faulkner was born 100 years ago this fall, and in some ways he never wanted to leave that time. Every store that changed hands, every advance in technology, made him mourn the world in which he grew up. One wonders what he'd say about Rowan Oak, now an air-conditioned museum where a Xerox machine sits atop the old kerosene stove.

But just as he wanted Oxford to stay the same, he wanted it to be different. He'd be glad the schools have been integrated. He'd be gratified to see his works displayed in large cabinets at the county library, if only because they once were thought unfit for his fellow Mississippians.

All in all, it's hard to say what he would think of Oxford and it's hard to say what Oxford thinks of Faulkner. University of Mississippi football is a much bigger draw than Rowan Oak, and you'll find a lot more people who have heard of Faulkner than have lately picked up one of his books.

Hang out on the square and you'll hear the stories - like the time he turned down a White House dinner because he wouldn't travel to eat with strangers. And you'll see Faulkner relatives - a nephew or a grandniece, men with Faulkner's downturned mustache, and men and women with his small, still eyes.

But the more you learn about Faulkner the more complicated he becomes. If you put together everything he said and was said about him you'd have a humble-boastful-traditional-progressive-gentleman-drunk-worldly-coun try boy.

''If you asked me to describe William Faulkner I couldn't do it,'' says the Rev. Duncan Gray, pastor at Faulkner's church the last few years of his life.

''I've heard and I've read so many anecdotes and so many things written about that gentleman, mutually contradictory, I would put very little stock in any of them. The best way to find out where William Faulkner was, philosophically, or theologically, is to read his books.

''Of course, those, too, are contradictory and mutually exclusive in many ways.''

---

It's easy to fall in love with Oxford, with its doubled-porched buildings and oceanic front lawns, the spicy-lemon smell of the magnolias and the courthouse clocks that rarely work because no one knows how to fix them.

But when clouds gather, something happens to this town. The trees turn dark and moody and the wind hisses like a coven of angry crickets. A pleasant walk on a country back road can suddenly turn gray with fear.

There are spirits in the South and Faulkner summoned them. He wanted to show the difference between how his people seemed to be and how they really were, if only to say they were unknowable.

He was born William Falkner on Sept. 25, 1897, in the town of New Albany, 40 miles northeast of Oxford. The oldest of four brothers, Faulkner, who changed the spelling of his last name as a young man, moved to Oxford with his family when he was 5.

He was an aloof but gifted child who decided in grade school he was going to be a writer, just like his great-grandfather, Col. William Clark Falkner, a Confederate officer and author of the popular romance ''The White Rose of Memphis.''

For all that he put down on paper, Faulkner's most protean creation was his own identity. Over the years, he presented himself as a wounded World War I veteran (a lie), an English gentleman (a farce), a bearded bohemian (a phase) and a simple farmer (an evasion).

''He often claimed he never read 'Ulysses,''' says author Shelby Foote, a longtime friend. ''That's one of the ways he handled reporters. If they asked him things he didn't like to talk about, he either lied or didn't answer. He was afraid they'd find out about all the lies he told as a young man.''

In the 1920s, he wrote pastoral poetry, worked briefly - and badly - as the local postmaster, and published a couple of interesting, uneven novels. He also married a childhood friend, Estelle Oldham, with whom he had a daughter, Jill.

Only at the end of the '20s did he figure out what to do with all he had learned from reading Joyce and Balzac and Shakespeare. With ''Sartoris'' he found his subject matter, his own Lafayette County (renamed Yoknapatawpha in his fiction), and with ''The Sound and the Fury'' he found his voice.

That subject matter. Yoknapatawpha was a fallen world of whites haunted by the Civil War and of blacks simply trying to endure. If F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the past as a lost, golden age, Faulkner saw it as judgment endlessly handed down.

That voice. His were sentences that ran for pages, composed in the heat of genius and whiskey and Mississippi. Read ''Absalom, Absalom!'' or ''The Sound and the Fury'' and you'll find yourself thinking in the rhythms of Faulkner, which is a way of saying Faulkner wrote in the rhythms of all of us.

Here's what he wrote about: Suicide. Incest. Rape. Murder. His publisher's first reaction to the novel ''Sanctuary'' was that they'd both end up in jail. The author's own father told a young woman carrying a Faulkner novel that it wasn't fit for her to read.

''This young man was attributing evil to his fellow citizens and that didn't improve his standing, of course. He was resisting this movement to remove evil from the curriculums, from history,'' says Southern historian C. Vann Woodward.

''At first I didn't like Faulkner's work because Faulkner wrote about the kinds of things that many people would want to forget,'' says Ernest Gaines, author of ''The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,'' and several other novels.

''But I began to realize what he was doing. He reminded me of things that I saw. I come from the country (rural Louisiana) and I come from the same kind of situation: the grocery store he writes about, the kinds of farms, the poor peasants, the broken down wagons and slow mules. I had never seen that in anybody's writing as plainly as I saw it in his. He really makes you pay attention.''

Some of the loneliest people you'll ever meet are in Faulkner's books. What Faulkner could do, as well as any writer, was to show the way people lived their own minds, had their own way of seeing the world and their own reasons for how they acted.

In ''As I Lay Dying,'' for example, he uses more than a dozen narrators to follow the disastrous journey of the Bundrens, the poor farming family who are returning the matriarch's corpse to her people.

Among those we hear from are Vardaman, the pregnant daughter looking to get rid of her baby; Anse, as worried about getting his teeth fixed as about transporting his late wife, and Addie, the matriarch, who looks back upon her empty life and upon the husband who couldn't fill it.

''Love, he called it,'' she tells us. ''But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that the words were like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash (her son) did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to.''

Faulkner's most influential works were written in the 1930s, but he didn't become widely recognized until the middle of the next decade. Critic Malcolm Cowley compiled an anthology for the Viking Portable series and Jean-Paul Sartre declared, ''Pour les jeunes en France, Faulkner c'est un dieu'' (''For the young in France, Faulkner is a god'').

In 1945, virtually all of Faulkner's books were out of print and most of his income came from the screenwriting he did for Hollywood. By the end of the decade, he had won the Nobel Prize.

''His Nobel Prize acceptance speech espoused faith in the survival of man. This, as many pointed out, is very different from the impression one gets from the great, early novels,'' says Faulkner friend and biographer Joseph Blotner.

''As time went on, as he grew older, his view changed. He had seen mankind endure. He was not the same young writer, intense as young writers tend to be and very keenly aware of the tragic aspects of the human experience.''

His thinking may have mellowed in his later years, but his way of life was killing him. In the summer of 1962, he was badly injured in a riding accident, drank heavily and was admitted to a sanitarium.

White-haired and worn-out, he died of a heart attack two months before his 65th birthday. He was buried in a nearby cemetery, on a slightly raised plot of land, where a sign praises him for his ''stories about his people'' and where mourners have been known to pour whiskey on his grave.

---

He can't draw you a road map, the Rev. Gray admits, but he believes William Faulkner is in heaven.

Gray is in a sitting room at St. Peter's Episcopal Church, where Faulkner was an occasional (very occasional) worshiper. The reverend served here from 1957 to 1965 and still closely resembles the bald, earnest-looking man who presided over his friend, ''Mr. Bill's,'' funeral.

''He was a long way from being an orthodox Christian,'' Gray says in his pleasant, forgiving drawl, ''but on the other hand, I think this needs to be said: I think he considered himself to be Christian - not a very good one, not an orthodox one. But he couldn't shed it even if he had wanted to. It was not a question of whether he believed it or didn't believe it. It was just there.''

Faulkner did know his Bible, well enough to know how his behavior appeared in the eyes of the Lord. He drank, cheated on his wife and neglected his daughter. Dinners at Rowan Oak were often eaten in silence.

And there was his outrageous pride. God, he said, created some pretty good characters, but William Faulkner could make better ones.

Better than God. In Ecclesiastes it's written that whatever God does cannot be altered or improved upon. You can neither add anything, nor take anything away: ''nothing new under the sun.'' No wonder in the Middle Ages storytellers were thought as sinful as sorcerers.

If there's a God in Faulkner's fiction, it's the author himself. With his mythical Yoknapatawpha, he created a world and named every creature. He set them in a Promised Land and for the sin of slavery cursed them to the third and fourth generation.

''In 'Go Down, Moses,' there is a long sequence in which Ike McCaslin and his surrogate father discuss Ike's renouncing his birthright, the plantation,'' Blotner says.

''As they talk, they draw an analogy between the new world - the United States, the South - and God's giving man a second choice whereby he could save himself.''

Faulkner had his doubts about the afterlife, but he cared a great deal about immortality. The author, who once swore he would be Earth's last private man, called writing ''a scratch on the wall of oblivion.'' At times, he meant it quite literally.

On the walls of his old work room in Rowan Oak is a detailed outline of his novel, ''A Fable,'' which was published in 1954 and which brought him the Pulitzer Prize. The novel took him a decade to finish and he considered it his masterpiece.

But there's a reason the outline remains. Family members differ on exactly what happened, but this we can say for sure: After the book had been published, Faulkner came home one day and found that the walls had been painted over, some say by his wife.

Faulkner was enraged, but he soon was reminded that a friend had taken a picture of the office. The friend sent him a copy and Faulkner proceeded to replace and expand upon the original outline.

And that wasn't the end of it. He then applied a coat of varnish to make sure no one covered the walls again.

Reading him, Flannery O'Connor once observed, made her want to quit and raise chickens.

For writers, especially Southern writers, William Faulkner can be like a rich property owner, one on whose land you trespass at your own risk.

''One of the reasons I quit writing about the South was that I realized everything I knew about the South - and I'm talking about Mississippi - I actually knew because he had written it,'' said Richard Ford, a Mississippi native whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ''Independence Day,'' is set in the Northeast.

''Faulkner, for me, had so captured its essence that I felt there was nothing I could bring that hadn't already been covered.''

Nevertheless, writers from the South and from all over the world have been influenced by Faulkner - by his language, by his storytelling and by his ability to describe in detail a specific place and time. Among his disciples are Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy.

The challenge of Faulkner, of any artistic influence, is how to absorb him without being absorbed by him. Morrison and Marquez are among those who succeeded. Others have been cited, fairly or unfairly, as examples of those who didn't.

''Robert Penn Warren, my late friend, much lamented, was a very Faulknerian novelist,'' said critic Harold Bloom. ''Except for 'All the King's Men,' his novels were rather secondary, because again one feels Faulkner's influence too intensely.''

There are so many ways to be influenced by Faulkner. Depending on where you're from and what you're looking for, the Nobel laureate has something different to offer.

Fellow Mississippians Shelby Foote and Barry Hannah praise him for the dignity and complexity of his characters. Ernest Gaines and Albert Murray credit his ability to describe the life of poor, rural blacks.

Jay Parini's ''The Last Station'' and Graham Swift's ''Last Orders'' are among the novels that use rotating narrators in the tradition of ''As I Lay Dying.'' In fact, Swift's book, which won the 1996 Booker prize, was criticized for being a little too close to Faulkner.

Faulkner's style is just as seductive. Along with Whitman and Melville, he's in the great tradition of American ''overwriters'' - wonderfully excessive writers whose language is as open and as expansive as the country itself.

''The thing that moves me so much is I think he found a way to see American speech as poetry, to see working people's language as uniquely poetic,'' said Allan Gurganus, author of the best-selling novel ''Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All.''

''I think he could communicate sensation better than any writer I know,'' Foote said.

''He could tell you the texture, the feel, the smell of things. He could tell you what it was like to be in the woods at dawn. He could tell you the texture of the wood as you ran your hand along it.

''He said, 'You should write about the heart, otherwise you'll end up writing about the glands.' Well, he wrote from the glands better than anyone I know.''


OXFORD, Miss. (Sept. 5) - In the spring of 1932, William Faulkner arrived for his first day of work at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He was late and his head was cut and bleeding. The studio's newest screenwriter clearly had been drinking.

''We're going to put you on a Wallace Beery picture,'' a supervisor told Faulkner, who announced he had been hit by a cab in New Orleans.

''Who's he?'' said the author about Beery, then a big star. ''I've got an idea for Mickey Mouse.''

Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and many other writers in the '30s and '40s Faulkner did time in Hollywood, where the skies were clear and the lifestyle foggy.

During the two decades he was there he spent his time drinking, hunting, drinking some more and having a long-term affair. He even managed to get his name on a few screenplays.

The author went to Hollywood because he needed the money. Few of his early books sold well and he had to support his wife, daughter and several other family members. Jack Warner, for whose studio Faulkner worked in the '40s, liked to boast, ''I've got America's best writer for $300 a week.''

Hollywood, Faulkner once said, was the only place where you could be climbing up the ladder and still get stabbed in the back. But he was lucky to have a friend in director Howard Hawks, who liked to rough it as much as the author did and who used him for such great films as ''To Have and Have Not'' and ''The Big Sleep.''

The two of them once went dove-hunting with Hawk's buddy, Clark Gable. Hawks and Faulkner got to talking about books and Gable asked Faulkner whom he considered to be the best modern writers.

''Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann, John Dos Passos, and myself,'' Faulkner answered.

''Oh,'' said Gable. ''Do you write?''

''Yes, Mr. Gable,'' said Faulkner. ''What do you do?''

Faulkner's fellow scriptwriters enjoyed his endless stories about his native Mississippi and they respected his ability to write quickly. But sometimes he seemed to forget where he was. He would compose monologues that ran page after page, more suitable for ''The Sound and the Fury'' than for a Hollywood feature.

''I'm supposed to say all that?'' a confused Humphrey Bogart asked on the set of ''To Have and Have Not,'' after Faulkner handed him a speech that lasted six pages.

''Bill, that's fine,'' said Hawks, cutting in. Hawks and Bogart then revised the speech themselves.

Faulkner's script ideas weren't always used, but Hollywood was interested in his books. Among those adapted were ''The Sound and the Fury,'' ''Sanctuary'' and ''Pylon.'' An acclaimed version of ''Intruder in the Dust'' was actually filmed in Oxford and ''The Hamlet'' was the basis for ''The Long Hot Summer,'' starring Paul Newman and Orson Welles.

''One of the last times I saw him I was in New York. Faulkner (who died in 1962) was staying at the Algonquin and so was I,'' said author Shelby Foote, a friend of Faulkner's.

''I was supposed to meet with Stanley Kubrick, who wanted to work with me on a script. I ran into Faulkner in the lobby and asked him for his advice. He said, 'Take the money, but don't take the work seriously.'

''I decided not to go out there.''