Content introduction I chapter william faulkner, the world’s most famous writer and nobel laureate

II CHAPTER THE NOVELS AND WORKS THAT MADE WILLIAM FAULKNER WORLD FAMOUS("THE SOUND AND THE FURY", "LIGHT AUGUST", "THE BEAR")
2.1 The main content and plot summary of the novels

The Sound and the Fury

In autumn 1928, just after his 31st birthday, Faulkner began working on The Sound and the Fury. He started by writing three short stories about a group of children with the last name Compson, but soon began to feel that the characters he had created might be better suited for a full-length novel. Perhaps as a result of disappointment in the initial rejection of Flags in the Dust, Faulkner had now become indifferent to his publishers and wrote this novel in a much more experimental style. In describing the writing process for this work, Faulkner would later say, "One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher's addresses and book lists. I said to myself, 'Now I can write.'"[36] After its completion, Faulkner insisted that Ben Wasson not do any editing or add any punctuation for clarity.[26]
In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, with Andrew Kuhn serving as best man at the wedding. Estelle brought with her two children from her previous marriage to Cornell Franklin and Faulkner hoped to support his new family as a writer. Faulkner and Estelle later had a daughter, Jill, in 1933. He began writing As I Lay Dying in 1929 while working night shifts at the University of Mississippi Power House. The novel would be published in 1930.[37]
Beginning in 1930, Faulkner sent some of his short stories to various national magazines. Several of these were published and brought him enough income to buy a house in Oxford for his family, which he named Rowan Oak.[38] He made money on his 1931 novel, Sanctuary, which was widely reviewed and read (but widely disliked for its perceived criticism of the South).[citation needed] With the onset of the Great Depression, Faulkner was not satisfied with his economic situation. With limited royalties from his work, he published short stories in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post to supplement his income.[39]

Light in August and foray into Hollywood

By 1932, Faulkner was in need of money. He asked Wasson to sell the serialization rights for his newly completed novel, Light in August, to a magazine for $5,000, but none accepted the offer. Then MGM Studios offered Faulkner work as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Faulkner was not an avid movie goer and had reservations about working in the movie industry. As André Bleikasten comments, he “was in dire need of money and had no idea how to get it…So he went to Hollywood.”[40] It has been noted that authors like Faulkner were not always hired for their writing prowess but "to enhance the prestige of the …writers who hired them."[40] He arrived in Culver City, California, in May 1932. The job would begin a sporadic relationship with moviemaking and with California, which was difficult but he endured in order to earn "a consistent salary that would support his family back home."[41]
His first screenplay was for Today We Live, an adaptation of his short story "Turnabout", which received a mixed response. He then wrote a screen adaptation of Sartoris that was never produced.[39] From 1932 to 1954, Faulkner worked on around 50 films.[42]
As Stefan Solomon observes, Faulkner was highly critical of what he found in Hollywood, and he wrote letters that were "scathing in tone, painting a miserable portrait of a literary artist imprisoned in a cultural Babylon."[43] Many scholars have brought attention to the dilemma he experienced and that the predicament had caused him serious unhappiness.[44][41][45] In Hollywood he worked with director Howard Hawks, with whom he quickly developed a friendship, as they both enjoyed drinking and hunting. Howard Hawks' brother, William Hawks, became Faulkner's Hollywood agent. Faulkner would continue to find reliable work as a screenwriter from the 1930s to the 1950s.[31][38]
Faulkner had an extramarital affair with Hawks' secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter,[46] later known as Meta Wilde.[47] The affair was chronicled in her book A Loving Gentleman.[47]
In 1942, Faulkner tried to join the United States Air Force but was rejected. He instead worked on local civil defense.[48]


When Light in August opens, Lena Grove has been walking for four weeks from Alabama to Jefferson, farther from her home than she has ever traveled. After living in a tiny room in her brother's house in the small town of Doane's Mill for eight years after her parents died, she began to sneak out of the bedroom window at night until she found herself pregnant. Even though Lucas Burch had left town six months before her brother found out, Lena refused to reveal his name.
Deciding not to wait for him to come for her, Lena sets out to find Lucas. On the road, Mr. Armstid, a farmer, decides to bring her home for the night. She later admits to him and his wife that she is not married but makes excuses for Lucas, insisting that such a good natured fellow as he needs some time to settle down. The next morning Armstid drives her to the town store and informs the men there that she needs a ride to Jefferson.
Byron Bunch thinks about the time three years earlier when he first met Joe Christmas at the lumber mill where he works in Jefferson. Joe did not speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him for months. Another stranger who came to the mill named Brown revealed that Joe lived in the woods on Joanna Burden's estate. After three years, Joe suddenly quits his job at the mill. Rumors circulate that he and Brown are selling whiskey and that they both are living in the cabin on Miss Burden's place.
One Saturday afternoon, Byron is alone at the mill since the others have gone to watch the fire that is consuming Miss Burden's house. Lena appears looking for Burch, and Byron falls in love with her. Byron soon realizes that the man she is looking for is Brown and, in order to prevent her disappointment, provides her with only a few minor details about him.
The narrative shifts to Reverend Gail Hightower, a defrocked minister who now struggles to make a living by selling greeting cards. He had been the town's Presbyterian minister but lost his church after "his wife went bad on him." She was killed in Memphis one night after either jumping or falling from a hotel window. The townspeople heard rumors that there was a man in the room with her and that they both were drunk.
Believing that Hightower drove his wife to commit suicide, the townspeople refused to come back to his church, so he was forced to resign. After he did not fire his housekeeper when he was warned about being alone in his home with a black woman, he was severely beaten by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually, the townspeople began to ignore him and left him alone.
Byron tells Hightower about Lena, whom he has just set up at the boarding house, and they wonder who started the fire at the Burden house. A man passing by saw the fire and found Brown drunk inside the house. Upstairs, he discovered Miss Burden, almost decapitated. Byron informs Hightower that Brown and Joe have been selling whiskey from her property and that Joe is part black.
That night, Brown appears in town claiming Joe killed Miss Burden and demands the reward that has been promised for information about the murder. He tells the sheriff that she and Joe had been living "like man and wife" and that Joe is of mixed race. Byron believes that Brown set the house on fire and hopes that if he gets the money, he will marry Lena.
The narrative then goes back to the night before the murder, as Joe thinks about his complex and brutal two-year relationship with Joanna Burden. He is angry that she lied about her age and never told him that women can lose their sexual desire after going through menopause. He is also incensed that she tried to pray over him. Filled with the desire to "smell horses … because they are not women," and hearing strange voices in his head, he walks the next day to the black community on the outskirts of town and confronts some residents with a razor in his hand. Later, that night, he kills Joanna.
The narrative flashes back to when Joe was five and living in an orphanage "like a shadow … sober and quiet." One day, he sneaks into the washroom and eats some toothpaste that belongs to the young dietician who works at the orphanage. As the dietician enters the room with a man, he hides behind a curtain and begins to feel ill from the toothpaste. When the couple begins to have sex, Joe throws up and so is discovered. Thinking that he had been spying on her, the woman screams, "you little n―bastard!"
Over the next few days, she becomes desperate as she waits for him to tell the matron about what she was doing in the washroom. Determining that the janitor, who readers later discover is Joe's grandfather, hates Joe as well, the dietician tells him what happened. The janitor snatches him the next morning, afraid that he will be sent to a black orphanage. The police catch him, however, and bring Joe back.
The woman who runs the orphanage determines that Joe needs to be placed at once and finds a farming couple, Mr. and Mrs. McEachern, who agree to adopt him. Mr. McEachern, who is characterized by his cold eyes, vows to make Joe "grow up to fear God and abhor idleness and vanity."
Three years later, the battle of wills between Joe and Mr. McEachern has intensified, as evinced in an incident when the latter tries to force the boy to learn his catechism. When Joe refuses, Mr. McEachern beats him. Feeling pity for the boy, Mrs. McEachern brings him a tray of food that evening but he dumps it in the corner. An hour later, he eats the food alone in his room, "like a savage, like a dog."
When Joe is fourteen, a group of friends and he gather one afternoon at a sawmill where they take sexual turns with a black girl who sits in the shadows. When it is Joe's turn, he begins to beat her and the others pull him off. At home, McEachern whips him for fighting.
One night, when Joe is eighteen, he climbs out his window using a rope. He wears the new suit that he had hidden in the barn, bought with the money he gained from selling his calf. McEachern had given the calf to Joe to teach him responsibility. Joe sneaks out that night to meet Bobbie, a waitress he met in town, and to take her to a dance at the local schoolhouse. He wishes that McEachern would try to stop him.
Joe's relationship with Bobbie began a year earlier when he and his father went to the restaurant one day. Joe was immediately drawn to her, but his father determined that the place was disreputable and so never went there again. When Joe turned eighteen, he returned with a dime in his pocket. After ordering pie and coffee, he discovers that he does not have enough to pay for both. Bobbie covers for him, insisting that she had made the mistake in the order. Out on the street, "his spirit [is] wrung with abasement and regret."
Joe returns to the farm where he works hard, almost feverishly. His father notices and decides to reward him with the calf, although he insists that he probably would regret his action when Joe falls back "into sloth and idleness again." One month later, Joe goes to town with a half dollar that his mother gave him. When he tries to leave the coin for Bobbie to repay her for her kindness, the men in the restaurant make fun of him. On the street, however, Bobbie shows him her appreciation for his thoughtfulness.

This longest, fullest version of "The Bear" actually radiates in its turn from a commissary scene on the McCaslin plantation where two second cousins—ascetic Ike McCaslin and plantation manager McCaslin Edmonds—confront each other and their radically differing philosophies about the family ledgers found in the plantation store. Cass sees them as they were doubtless meant to be seen: as the careful accounting of property bought, earned, and dispensed. Ike, however, notes that black slaves of the McCaslin family (the parallel Beauchamp family) are also treated as property, so the apparently neutral ledger becomes for him a revealing and damning chronicle of Southern race relations and a singular family diary that suggests the present responsibility for the past.
The most elusive entries—about the slave girl Eunice and her daughter, to which no McCaslin has attended since earlier brothers quarreled about their significance—is unscrambled by Ike to show that their own forebear had violated a mulatto daughter. Horrified by this evidence of incest, Ike sets out to repair the damage by seeing that the descendants of the illegitimate line receive three times the money that was first promised them. What Cass sees as a sad if telling reminder of the Southern burden of the past, Ike sees as a tormented and bitter indictment of his own blood line and kin. In time his mission of reparation and reconciliation will end in defeat since one descendant is dead (or unlocatable), one has already claimed his inheritance as property and lives a proud and separate life, and another refuses to accept any guilt-ridden blood money. As a further penalty, Ike withdraws from the plantation and asks no further support, instead marrying a carpenter's daughter; when that marriage fails, he takes what little he can from the plantation and lives a lonely and isolated life in the city of Jefferson.
The added fourth section to "The Bear" for Go Down, Moses, then, is a compact history of the South in terms of race, economy, social life, clan caste, and class. The guilt of the past is visited upon the sons, and the sons find the burden unbearable, the situation irresolvable. The three sections that precede this take place at an earlier time, in the young boy Isaac's youth, when, at the age of 16, he joins the older hunters on their annual ritual hunt for "Old Ben," the gigantic wounded bear. This time, unlike other times, Isaac has a prescience that it will be their last hunt. "It was like the last act on a set stage. It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn't know what." When the killer dog Lion helps the part-Native American Boon Hogganbeck kill Old Ben after Old Ben has killed their dog, Ike's mentor Sam Fathers—half-black and half-Native American, the natural man of the woods—dies too, and Ike is reluctantly given permission to stay with Boon to bury the dog and the old man.
Although this is a moment of deep anguish for Isaac, he learns anew from Boon as he had from Sam about the cycles of nature, the cycles of birth and growth and death, of generation and decay, of gift and of loss. This is not what Cass understands; returning to fetch Ike, Cass accuses Boon of killing Sam, not understanding the ways of the woods, the ways of nature, or even the ways of the human heart. In retaliation, Boon refuses to return to the plantation. It is the first quarrel between Ike and Cass and looks forward directly to the commissary scene added later in order to give the full genealogical background to the cousins who no longer communicate.
The death of Old Ben takes the heart out of the annual fall hunting expeditions in northern Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Faulkner's fictional version of Lafayette County (just as the hunting camp is based on the camp of General Stone, the father of Faulkner's childhood friend and patron Phil Stone). But two years later, at the age of 18, Isaac feels the strong urge to return to the old hunting grounds in order to understand more completely the meaning of the bear, the old mentor, and the despairing Boon. He is filled with grief on the trip. The woods are being ransacked by a lumbering company that slowly but irrevocably destroys them forever. A train passes through the countryside, linking the commerce of the lumber camp with the economic forces of the town. A snake appears. And then, seated at the foot of the ancient, sacred gum tree, surrounded by chattering and scrambling squirrels, Boon is seen knocking powerfully and unsuccessfully at the barrel of his gun. "Get out of here! Dont touch them!" Boon shouts. "Dont touch a one of them! They're mine!" Although it is unclear if Boon is destroying or repairing his gun—or if, while living in a nature being gutted and annihilated around him, he is sane or mad—the sharp diminishment of the game available for the hunt and the sad demise of the one remaining hunter links the degeneration of history and the decline of humanity with the growth in a sense of possession.
Short versions of "The Bear" conclude at this point, although the longer version, with Ike seen at the age of 21 in the commissary, traces out the long life that follows as a much-diminishing thing. In either version, however, the forces of American commerce and materialism are placed in stark and damaging contrast with the beauty of the woods, the shared secrets of game to hunt, and the canny game that made a ritual of being hunted. What the fourth section adds is the matter of genealogy and the force of racial hatred. Reemphasizing the first chapter of Go Down, Moses, entitled "Was," the fourth part added to "The Bear" shows how possession of nature (the woods by the lumber industry) is analogous to the possession of slaves (to foster the cotton crops); how the impersonality, exploitation, and greed of the woods was matched in the whites' treatment of blacks, even when those blacks were their own descendants. This understanding of brother conquering brother (and cousin, cousin) suggests to the older Ike that the Civil War has never really ended, that brotherhood is a myth.
Ike's condemnation is searing and total; the last scene in the longer version—in which Ike's laughing wife refuses ever to give herself to him again, although she had wanted both him and his inheritance—may suggest that she and the lonely, ineffective Ike have both been somewhat maddened by their experiences. Only the later chapter, "Delta Autumn," in which the 70-year-old Ike hunts deer, not bear, shows that he continues to live, but his life is now void of purpose. When he denies a mulatto woman who turns out to be his old blood-relative, he also seems himself, finally, woefully inadequate to his own best intentions and uneducable to the lessons he once thought he had learned.
Except for a few early novels and two later ones, Faulkner spent his entire career charting through fiction the history of the South by way of its chief family lines. But only in Go Down, Moses are so many generations pulled together, and only in "The Bear" is the matter of race—the chief concern and sin of that history—made so powerfully and singularly clear. It is Faulkner's strongest testament to the past.
—Arthur F. Kinney