William Faulkner

Biography

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, a town that deeply influenced his major works. He's considered one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century, known for his intricate characters, experimental storytelling, and honest depictions of the American South. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, acknowledging his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel. His impact on future writers reached across continents and various literary styles.

Faulkner studied at the University of Mississippi for three semesters before leaving, having already become interested in writing poetry and fiction. During World War I, he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, but the war ended before he saw combat. After returning to Oxford, he spent some time in New Orleans, where he mingled with literary figures and finished his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, which was published in 1925. He returned to Mississippi and in 1927 published Sartoris, the first of his novels set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, a thinly disguised version of Lafayette County, which became the backdrop for most of his famous stories.

From 1929 to 1942, Faulkner was at his most creative and productive. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury, which used stream-of-consciousness narration and multiple unreliable viewpoints to tell the story of the declining Compson family. He followed this with As I Lay Dying in 1930, a novel narrated by fifteen different characters. Light in August came out in 1932, and Absalom, Absalom!, often seen as his most ambitious work, was published in 1936. During this time, he also worked off and on as a Hollywood screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's films To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.

Faulkner married Estelle Oldham in 1929, and they settled in Oxford, where he bought and renovated a rundown antebellum mansion he called Rowan Oak. Although his literary reputation in the U.S. had waned by the 1940s, the release of Malcolm Cowley's edited collection The Portable Faulkner in 1946 renewed widespread critical and popular interest in his work. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the National Book Award in 1951. Two of his later novels, A Fable and The Reivers, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1955 and 1963, respectively, the latter awarded posthumously.

Faulkner died on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi, from a heart attack after a fall from his horse the previous month. He was sixty-four years old. He left behind a body of work that changed what the American novel could be and remains a key reference in world literature.