William Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was a Nobel Prize-winning American author. One of the most influential writers of the 20th century, his reputation is based on his novels, novellas and short stories. However, he was also a published poet and an occasional screenwriter.
Easton Press William Faulkner books
The Sound and The Fury - 100 Greatest Books Ever Written - 2004The Works of William Faulkner (10 volume set) - 1992 including titles:
The Sound and The Fury
Light in August
As I Lay Dying
Go Down, Moses
Intruder in the Dust
The Unvanquished
Absalom, Absalom!
The Reivers: A Reminiscence
Collected Stories, Vol. I
Collected Stories, Vol. II
The Works of William Faulkner (11 volume set) - 1998 including titles:
The Sound and The Fury
Collected Stories, Vol. I
Collected Stories, Vol. II
Light in August
As I Lay Dying
Absalom, Absalom!
The Reivers: A Reminiscence
Go Down, Moses
Intruder in the Dust
The Unvanquished
A Fable
Franklin Library William Faulkner books
A Fable - Pulitzer Prize Classics - 1976
The Sound and The Fury - Limited First Edition Society - 1976
Selected Letters of William Faulkner - Limited First Edition Society - 1976
The Sound and The Fury - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1977
Absolom, Absolom! - 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature - 1978
These Thirteen - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1979
A Light in August - World's Best Loved Books - 1979
Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner - Limited First Edition Society - 1979
The Sound and The Fury - Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century - 1980
The Reivers - Pulitzer Prize Classics - 1983
Most of Faulkner's works are set in his native state of Mississippi, and he is considered one of the most important Southern writers, along with Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Flannery O'Connor, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and Tennessee Williams.
Writer William Faulkner biography
William was raised in and heavily influenced by the state of Mississippi, as well as by the history and culture of the South as a whole. When he was four years old, his entire family moved to the nearby town of Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life. Oxford is the model for the town of "Jefferson" in his fiction, and Lafayette County, Mississippi, which contains the town of Oxford, is the model for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner's great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in northern Mississippi who served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, founded a railroad, and gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County. He also wrote several novels and other works, establishing a literary tradition in the family. Colonel Falkner served as the model for Colonel John Sartoris in his great-grandson's writing.
The older Falkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which they lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of blacks and whites, his characterization of Southern characters and timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons. Unable to join the United States Army because of his height, (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner first joined the Canadian and then the British Royal Air Force, yet did not see any World War I wartime action.
The definitive reason for Faulkner's change in the spelling of his last name is still unknown. Faulkner himself may have made the change in 1918 upon joining the Air Force or, according to one story, a careless typesetter simply made an error. When the misprint appeared on the title page of Faulkner's first book and the author was asked about it, he supposedly replied, "Either way suits me."
Although Faulkner is heavily identified with Mississippi, he was living in New Orleans in 1925 when he wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, after being influenced by Sherwood Anderson to try fiction. The small house at 624 Pirate's Alley, just around the corner from St. Louis Cathedral, is now the premises of Faulkner House Books, and also serves as the headquarters of the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society.
Later life and death
Personal life
Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church just outside of Oxford, Mississippi. They honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first living with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase. In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as "The Bailey Place." He and his family lived there until his daughter Jill, after her mother's death, sold the property to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner's day. Faulkner's scribblings are still preserved on the wall there, including the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the novel A Fable.
Faulkner accomplished what he did despite a lifelong serious drinking problem. As he stated on several occasions, and as was witnessed by members of his family, the press, and friends at various periods over the course of his career, he did not drink while writing, nor did he believe that alcohol helped to fuel the creative process. It is now widely believed that Faulkner used alcohol as an "escape valve" from the day-to-day pressures of his regular life, including his financial straits, rather than the more romantic vision of a brilliant writer who needed alcohol to pursue his craft[citation needed].
Faulkner is known to have had two extramarital affairs. One was with Howard Hawks's secretary and script-girl, Meta Carpenter. The other, lasting from 1949 to 1953, was with a young writer, Joan Williams, who considered him her mentor. She made her relationship with Faulkner the subject of her 1971 novel The Wintering.
Faulkner also had a romance with Jean Stein, an editor, author, and daughter of movie mogul Jules Stein.
Writing
From the early 1920s to the outbreak of WWII, when Faulkner left for Hollywood, he published 13 novels and numerous short stories, the body of work that grounds his reputation and for which he was awarded Nobel Prize at the age of 52. This prodigious output, mainly driven by an obscure writer's need for money, includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was also a prolific writer of short stories. His first short story collection, These 13 (1932), includes many of his most acclaimed (and most frequently anthologized) stories, including "A Rose for Emily," "Red Leaves", "That Evening Sun," and "Dry September."
Faulkner set many of his short stories and novels in Yoknapatawpha County—based on, and nearly geographically identical to, Lafayette County, of which his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi is the county seat. Yoknapatawpha was Faulkner's "postage stamp," and the bulk of work that it represents is widely considered by critics to amount to one of the most monumental fictional creations in the history of literature. Three novels, The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion, known collectively as the Snopes Trilogy document the town of Jefferson and its environs as an extended family headed by Flem Snopes insinuates itself into the lives and psyches of the general populace. It is a stage wherein rapaciousness and decay come to the fore in a world where such realities were always present, but never so compartmentalized and well defined; their sources never so easily identifiable.
Additional works include Sanctuary (1931), a sensationalist "pulp fiction"-styled novel, characterized by André Malraux as "the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story." Its themes of evil and corruption, bearing Southern Gothic tones, resonate to this day. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a play/novel sequel to Sanctuary, is the only play that Faulkner published, except for his The Marionettes, which he essentially self-published in a few hand-written copies as a young man.
Faulkner is known for an experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his peer Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters—ranging from former slaves or descendents of slaves, to poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, to Southern aristocrats.
In an interview with The Paris Review in 1956, Faulkner remarked, "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him." Another esteemed Southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, stated that, "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down."
Faulkner also wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The Marble Faun (1924) and A Green Bough (1933), and a collection of crime-fiction short stories, Knight's Gambit.
Hollywood
In
the early 1940s, Howard Hawks invited Faulkner to come to Hollywood to
become a screenwriter for the films Hawks was directing. Faulkner
happily accepted because he badly needed the money, and Hollywood paid
well. Thus Faulkner contributed to the scripts for the films Hawks made
from Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and
Have Not. Faulkner became good friends with director Howard Hawks, the
screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, and the actors Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall.
An apocryphal story regarding Faulkner during his
Hollywood years found him with a case of writer's block at the studio.
He told Hawks he was having a hard time concentrating and would like to
write at home. Hawks was agreeable, and Faulkner left. Several days
passed, with no word from the writer. Hawks telephoned Faulkner's hotel
and found that Faulkner had checked out several days earlier. It seems
Faulkner had spoken quite literally, and had returned home to
Mississippi to finish the screenplay.
Awards
Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." He donated a portion of his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers," eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion to a local Oxford bank to establish an account to provide scholarship funds to help educate African-American education majors at nearby Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.Faulkner won two Pulitzer Prizes for what are considered as his "minor" novels: his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Reivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955.
In 1946, Faulkner was one of three finalists for the first Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award. He came in second to Manly Wade Wellman.
On August 3, 1987, the United States Postal Service issued a 22 cent postage stamp in his honor.
The Reivers - A Reminiscence
One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi. Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey, for which they are all ill-equipped, that ends at Miss Reba's bordello in Memphis. From there a series of wild misadventures ensues involving horse smuggling, trainmen, sheriffs' deputies, and jail.
The Sound and The Fury
The
Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William
Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including stream of
consciousness. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's
fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when
Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published a sensationalist
story, which Faulkner later claimed was written only for money, The
Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner
began to receive critical attention.
The tragedy of the Compson
family features some of the most memorable characters in literature:
beautiful, rebellious Caddy; the manchild Benjy; haunted, neurotic
Quentin; Jason, the brutal cynic; and Dilsey, their black servant. Their
lives fragmented and harrowed by history and legacy, the character’s
voices and actions mesh to create what is arguably Faulkner’s
masterpiece and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.
Ever
since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The
Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this
century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family
through four fractured narratives, The Sound and the Fury explores
intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only
self centredness. At its heart this is a novel about lovelessness 'only
an idiot has no grief; only a fool would forget it. What else is there
in this world sharp enough to stick to your guts?'
Light in August
Light in August, a novel that contrasts stark tragedy with hopeful perseverance in the face of mortality, which features some of Faulkner’s most memorable characters: guileless, dauntless Lena Grove, in search of the father of her unborn child; Reverend Gail Hightower, a lonely outcast haunted by visions of Confederate glory; and Joe Christmas, a desperate, enigmatic drifter consumed by his mixed ancestry.
As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members including Addie herself as well as others; the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic.
Go Down, Moses
Go
Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set
in Faulkner’s mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of
perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships
between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive
novel rich in implication and insight.
Intruder in the Dust
Set in the deep south that provided the backdrop for all of Faulkner's finest fiction, Intruder in the Dust is the novel that marks the final phase of its author's outstanding creative period. The chronicle of an elderly black farmer arrested for the murder of a white man and under threat from the lynch mob is a characteristically Faulknerian tale of dark omen, its sole ray of hope the character of the young white boy who repays an old favour by proving the innocence of the man who saved him from drowning in an icy creek.
The Unvanquished
Set
in Mississippi during the Civil War and Reconstruction, The
Unvanquished focuses on the Sartoris family, who, with their code of
personal responsibility and courage, stand for the best of the Old
South's traditions.
A Fable
This
novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955.
An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and
dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally
considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be
recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the
Faulkner oeuvre.
Absolom, Absolom!
Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is considered by many to be William Faulkner's masterpiece. Although the novel's complex and fragmented structure poses considerable difficulty to readers, the book's literary merits place it squarely in the ranks of America's finest novels. The story concerns Thomas Sutpen, a poor man who finds wealth and then marries into a respectable family. His ambition and extreme need for control bring about his ruin and the ruin of his family. Sutpen's story is told by several narrators, allowing the reader to observe variations in the saga as it is recounted by different speakers. This unusual technique spotlights one of the novel's central questions: To what extent can people know the truth about the past?
These Thirteen
These 13 is a 1931 collection of short stories written by William Faulkner, and dedicated to his first daughter, Alabama, who died nine days after her birth on January 11, 1931, and to his wife Estelle.
These 13, Faulkner's first release of short stories, contained the following stories:
Victory
Ad Astra
All the Dead Pilots
Crevasse
Red Leaves
A Rose for Emily
A Justice
Hair
That Evening Sun
Dry September
Mistral
Divorce in Naples
Carcassonne
Source and additional information: William Faulkner