William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, which would become the model for the fictional Jefferson, county seat of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. He came from a family with deep roots in Southern history — his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the family later added the “u”), was a Civil War officer, railroad builder, and novelist who cast a long shadow. Faulkner left school early and worked variously as a postmaster, a book clerk, and a carpenter’s assistant before serving briefly in the Royal Canadian Air Force near the end of World War I, an experience that reinforced his lifelong romanticism about military valor. He was largely self-educated, and the voracious, idiosyncratic nature of his reading — in French symbolist poetry, in the Bible, in Greek tragedy — is evident on every page of his mature work.

Faulkner published his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, in 1926, and found his true material and voice with The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930). The two novels were written in rapid succession and established the formal experimentation and the Yoknapatawpha setting that would define his career. As I Lay Dying was written in six weeks while Faulkner worked night shifts at a power plant; its fifteen narrators, each with a distinct voice, tell the story of the Bundren family’s grotesque journey to bury their matriarch. The novel is one of the most technically daring in American literature — spare, dark, and often blackly funny.

The Sound and the Fury is Faulkner’s masterpiece and one of the most formally radical novels in the English language. It tells the story of the decline of the aristocratic Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi, through four successive sections, each told from a different perspective and in a different formal mode. The first section, narrated by the severely cognitively impaired Benjy Compson, is one of the most challenging openings in modern fiction — a stream of consciousness that moves without clear markers between different periods of time, organized by sensation and emotion rather than chronological logic. The second section, narrated by the brilliant and suicidal Quentin Compson on the day of his death, is saturated with the South’s obsession with honor, history, and the past. The novel’s concern with time, memory, loss, and the decay of a social order made it a defining document of Southern modernism.

Faulkner’s prose is dense, hypotactic, and deliberately difficult: his sentences can run for pages, accumulating clauses and subordinations that enact the difficulty of knowing and saying anything clearly about the human past. He was influenced by Joyce and by the symbolist poets, and his language has a richness and strangeness that demands — and rewards — close, repeated reading. His subject was essentially the tragedy of the American South: its beauty, its brutality, its racial crimes, its mythology of honor and defeat, its inability to escape or fully reckon with its history.

Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, and his acceptance speech — in which he declared that the only subject worth writing about is “the human heart in conflict with itself” — is among the most celebrated in the Prize’s history. He also received two Pulitzer Prizes, for A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1963). He died on July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi, of a heart attack. His influence on American fiction — on writers from Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy to Gabriel García Márquez, who credited Faulkner as a primary influence on the development of magical realism — has been immeasurable, and he is universally recognized as one of the great novelists of the twentieth century.