William Faulkner
September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962
William Cuthbert Faulkner [ˈfɔ̯ːknɛə] was an American novelist. Faulkner, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 retrospectively for 1949, is considered the most important American novelist of the 20th century.His multi-layered oeuvre reflects, among other things, "the intellectual and cultural decline of the South and the growing influence of unscrupulous climbers after the Civil War," as well as the decadence of formerly respected Southern families and the contrasts between white and black residents. Most of his novels and short stories are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which was inspired by his real-life residence, Lafayette County. Faulkner is characterized in literature by universal symbolism and sophisticated narrative techniques such as the stream of consciousness, which he took up from European novelists such as James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf and processed independently.
It was not until the Nobel Prize in Literature that Faulkner gained financial independence and general fame. He was awarded the National Book Award in 1951 (for The Collected Stories of William Faulkner) and in 1955 (for A Legend) and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1955 (for A Legend) and posthumously in 1963 (for The Rogues). He was also awarded the O. Henry Prize for short stories twice, in 1939 for Arsonist and in 1949 for Eine Werbung.
Faulkner's great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in the history of the state of Mississippi and had settled in Ripley, Mississippi, in 1845. He was a colonel in the Confederate Army and in 1861 he formed and commanded the Second Mississippi Infantry Regiment. Falkner founded a railroad line and is the namesake of the small town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County. He wrote novels and other texts and is considered the model for the character of Colonel John Sartoris in several of Faulkner's texts. Ripley Cemetery now houses a monument to Colonel Falkner.Faulkner's grandfather, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, was also influential. As a lawyer, politician, businessman and banker, he was one of the prominent citizens of Oxford, Mississippi. He had also inherited his father's railway line. His son, Murry Cuthbert Falkner, born in 1870, was a rather unsuccessful and not very communicative businessman. Murry Falkner ran, often with his father's support, a mill for the production of oil from cottonseed, a small ice factory, a contract carriage shop and an ironmonger's shop. Eventually, he found a position in the administration of the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Murry Falkner married Maud Butler. William was the first of four sons of the couple. From the age of five, the family lived in Oxford, which at the time had around 2000 inhabitants, about half of whom were black. Oxford is the county seat of Lafayette County.
His mother encouraged Faulkner to read, so that he read works by William Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad and Honoré de Balzac as a child. At the age of 17, he left school without graduating. He got a job in his grandfather's bank, began to draw and write. While working in a gun shop, his surname was mistakenly spelled Faulkner. From then on, he used this name. When the United States entered the First World War, he volunteered for the Luftwaffe, but was rejected because he was only 1.67 meters tall. It was not until July 1918 that he was admitted to the training of the British Royal Air Force in Toronto, Canada, but was no longer used in the war. He then took some courses at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He published drawings, poems and prose in the university newspaper The Mississippian. In the fall of 1921, he worked for several months at a bookseller in New York. He then took over the management of the University of Mississippi mailroom, which he held until 1924.
In 1924 his first book, the poetry collection The Marble Faun, was published. In 1925, he lived in New Orleans for a few months, where he met the writer Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to write about his rural homeland. He completed his first novel, Soldiers' Pay, in May 1925, which deals with war events. Faulkner's shorter works were regularly published in a magazine in New Orleans and later published in book form under the title New Orleans. In the same year, together with his friend William Sprattling, he finished work on the book Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles. The book portrays 41 artists, including Faulkner and Sprattling himself. Since the book parodies Anderson's writing style, Anderson then terminated the friendship with Faulkner.
In July 1925, Faulkner and Sprattling sailed to Italy on a cargo ship. From there, Faulkner traveled via Switzerland to France, where he spent a long time in Paris. In December 1925, he returned to the United States from the United Kingdom. His subsequent work is considered his weakest novel: Mosquitoes (Mosquitoes), in which artists are again portrayed, was published in 1927. In September 1927, Faulkner finished his first novel, set in Yoknapatawpha County, a poetic recreation of Lafayette County. It was published in 1929 in a greatly abridged version under the title Sartoris. The long version was not published until 1973 as Flags in the Dust. The focus is on two war returnees and the topics of guilt, morality and the past.
From 1928 onwards, Faulkner wrote his four best-known novels as well as numerous short stories within four years. The novels and almost all short stories of this time are set in Yoknapatawpha County. In the late summer of 1928, Faulkner completed work on The Sound and the Fury. This novel, influenced by James Joyce, was published in 1929 by Cape & Smith in New York. The criticism was overwhelmingly positive, but the initial print run of 1000 copies was only sold after one and a half years. In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham-Franklin, whom he had long admired and who had previously been married to another man. Married life was marked by economic problems. So they had to live in an apartment building, and Faulkner took a job as a supervisor in the university's heating plant.
This work resulted in a large part of his next novel, As I Lay Dying, a book about a family transporting a corpse during a Mississippi flood. It took Faulkner only seven weeks to complete the novel. The novel was published in 1930 and income from a number of short stories such as A Rose for Emily enabled the Faulkners to buy the Rowan Oak house in Oxford, which Faulkner kept until his death. In May 1929, Faulkner completed the first version of the novel Sanctuary. The book was published in 1931 and deals with female sexuality and moral decay. The book, which was quite revealing for the time and is written in the pulp fiction style, became a success and also made Faulkner known in the United Kingdom and France. The Faulkners' first daughter, Alabama, was born in 1931 and died nine days later. In August 1932, the novel Light in August was published, which he had begun without a fixed plan. It was Faulkner's first work to be translated into German.
In 1932 he signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and from then on wrote screenplays for the film industry in Hollywood. In 1933, Faulkner's daughter Jill was born. In addition to the screenplays, he wrote other novels. In 1934 he began work on the novel Absalom, Absalom!, which was published in 1936. In 1935, the novel Pylon (Wendemarke) was published, which is set in the airfield milieu and deals with a love triangle. Pylon was Faulkner's first novel, published by Random House, who also published all of his other books. In 1938, The Unvanquished was published, a cycle of six stories that was a great success. In it, Faulkner tells the experiences of a white boy and his black friend. The following year, the double novel Wild Palms – The Old Man was published. In 1940, The Hamlet, the first volume of the trilogy about the "upstart" Snopes, was published. The other parts were not published until 1957 and 1959, The Town and The Mansion. Faulkner was now living in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for the film adaptations of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, both directed by Howard Hawks. Faulkner had an affair with his secretary Meta Carpenter. In 1942, Faulkner published the collection of short stories Go Down, Moses (The Discarded Heritage, later in German under the original title), which consisted of seven related stories, some of which were rewritten. However, he still had financial problems. In 1944, only Sanctuary was still available in the USA. Faulkner applied to join the U.S. Army to fight in World War II, but was rejected. In 1946, Portable Faulkner was published, a compilation of previously published works. It was not until 1948 that a new book by him was published with the novel Intruder in the Dust. This was a success, and shortly after its release, the film was made in Faulkner's hometown of Oxford. The work of the film crew contributed greatly to his popularity in Oxford – Faulkner had previously been rejected by many people in the southern states because of his books. In 1949 he began an affair with the much younger writer Joan Williams, to whom he also served as an advisor and to whom Faulkner owes numerous reflections on his work.
In 1949, Faulkner was the favorite for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but a blocking minority of the jurors voted against him, so that the prize was not awarded for the time being. The following year, Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize retroactively for the year 1949 by unanimous vote. Faulkner set off on a hunting trip and wrote a rejection because he shied away from the publicity associated with the award. It was only with difficulty that he was persuaded to change his mind. Jill Faulkner accompanied him. The prize was presented to him in Stockholm in December 1950 together with the 1950 laureate, Bertrand Russell. The prize was awarded for Faulkner's "powerful and independent artistic contribution to America's new narrative literature." At the award ceremony, Faulkner said, among other things: The prize is not for him as a person, but for his work. Faulkner donated part of his prize money to a foundation to support young authors, which still awards the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction today. Another part was bequeathed to a bank in Oxford to pay out scholarships for the schooling of black children.
In the years following the Nobel Prize ceremony, Faulkner became more communicative. His works showed a clearer moral message. The Requiem for a Nun, written as a drama, is the sequel to Freistatt and has the morality of man as its theme. Completed in 1953 after a long time, A Fable (A Legend) is about French soldiers in the First World War. The book was published in 1954. In 1957 and 1958, Faulkner was writer in residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where his daughter also lived. He wrote his last novel, The Reivers, in 1961 within a few weeks.
On June 17, 1962, Faulkner fell during a horseback riding trip. On July 5, he was taken to a clinic and died there the following day of a heart attack, which was attributed to a thrombosis as a result of the riding accident. He was buried in Saint Peter Cemetery in Oxford.
His wife, Estelle Faulkner, died in 1973. His daughter Jill Faulkner then sold Rowan Oak, which became a Faulkner Museum. She married and was henceforth called Jill Faulkner Summers. She died in 2008.