John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Poetry collections[edit]

• 
  Chamber Music (poems, Elkin Mathews, 1907)
  
• 
  Giacomo Joyce (written 1907, published by Faber and Faber, 1968)
  
• 
  Pomes Penyeach (poems, Shakespeare and Company, 1927)
  
• 
  Collected Poems (poems, Black Sun Press, 1936, which includes Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach and other previously published works)
  

Play[edit]

• 
  Exiles (play, 1918)
  

Posthumous publications and drafts[edit]

Fiction

• 
  Stephen Hero (precursor to A Portrait; written 1904–06, published 1944)
  
• 
  The Cat and the Devil (London: Faber and Faber, 1965)
  
• 
  The Cats of Copenhagen (Ithys Press, 2012)
  
• 
  Finn's Hotel (Ithys Press, 2013)
  

Non-Fiction

• 
  The Critical Writings of James Joyce (Eds. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann, 1959)
  
• 
  Letters of James Joyce Vol. 1 (Ed. Stuart Gilbert, 1957)
  
• 
  Letters of James Joyce Vol. 2 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
  
• 
  Letters of James Joyce Vol. 3 (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1966)
  
• 
  Selected Letters of James Joyce (Ed. Richard Ellmann, 1975)
  

William Faulkner

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"Faulkner" redirects here. For other uses, see Faulkner (disambiguation) and William Faulkner (disambiguation).

William Faulkner
Faulkner in 1954, photographed by Carl Van Vechten
Born	William Cuthbert Falkner September 25, 1897 New Albany, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	July 6, 1962 (aged 64) Byhalia, Mississippi, U.S.
Language	English
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Mississippi
Period	1919–1962
Notable works	The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, "A Rose for Emily", "The Bear"
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (1949) Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1955, 1963) National Book Award (1951, 1955)
Spouse	Estelle Oldham   ​ (m. 1929)​
Signature

William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/;^[1][2] September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, screenplays, poetry, essays, and a play. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.^[3]

Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919 and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner's renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.^[4] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) appears on similar lists.^{[citation needed]}

Contents

• 
  1Life and career
  
  • 
    1.1Early life and education
    
  • 
    1.2Early career
    
  • 
    1.3Personal life
    
• 
  2Death
  
• 
  3Writing
  
• 
  4Legacy
  
• 
  5Awards
  
• 
  6Bibliography
  
• 
  7Collections
  
• 
  8Audio recordings
  
• 
  9Filmography
  
• 
  10See also
  
• 
  11References
  
  • 
    11.1Notes
    
  • 
    11.2Sources
    
  • 
    11.3Bibliography
    
• 
  12External links
  

Life and career[edit]

Early life and education[edit]

Born William Cuthbert Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner (August 17, 1870 – August 7, 1932) and Maud Butler (November 27, 1871 – October 16, 1960).^[5] He had three younger brothers: Murry Charles "Jack" Falkner (June 26, 1899 – December 24, 1975), author John Faulkner (September 24, 1901 – March 28, 1963), and Dean Swift Falkner (August 15, 1907 – November 10, 1935).

Soon after his first birthday, his family moved to Ripley, Mississippi, where his father Murry worked as the treasurer for the family-owned Gulf & Chicago Railroad Company.^[6] Murry hoped to inherit the railroad from his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, but John had little confidence in Murry's ability to run a business and sold it for $75,000. Following the sale of the railroad business, Murry proposed a plan to get a new start for his family by moving to Texas and becoming a rancher. Maud disagreed with this proposition, however, and they moved instead to Oxford, Mississippi, where Murry's father owned several businesses, making it easy for Murry to find work.^[7] Thus, four days prior to William's fifth birthday, the Faulkner family settled in Oxford, where he lived on and off for the rest of his life.^[5][8]

His family, particularly his mother Maud, his maternal grandmother Lelia Butler, and Caroline "Callie" Barr (the African American nanny who raised him from infancy) crucially influenced the development of Faulkner's artistic imagination. Both his mother and grandmother were avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educating him in visual language. While Murry enjoyed the outdoors and encouraged his sons to hunt, track, and fish, Maud valued education and took pleasure in reading and going to church. She taught her sons to read before sending them to public school and exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens and Grimms' Fairy Tales.^[7]

Faulkner's lifelong education by Callie Barr is central to his novels' preoccupations with the politics of sexuality and race.^[9]

As a schoolchild, Faulkner had success early on. He excelled in the first grade, skipped the second, and did well through the third and fourth grades. However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, Faulkner became a much quieter and more withdrawn child. He began to play hooky occasionally and became somewhat indifferent to his schoolwork, instead taking interest in studying the history of Mississippi on his own time beginning in the seventh grade. The decline of his performance in school continued, and Faulkner wound up repeating the eleventh and twelfth grade, never graduating from high school.^[7]

Faulkner spent his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders including those of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Falkner family. Faulkner's grandfather would also tell him of the exploits of William's great-grandfather and namesake, William Clark Falkner, who was a successful businessman, writer, and Confederate hero. Telling stories about "Old Colonel", as his family called him, had already become something of a family pastime when Faulkner was a boy.^[7] According to one of Faulkner's biographers, by the time William was born, his great-grandfather had "been enshrined long since as a household deity."^[10]

When he was 17, Faulkner met Phil Stone, who became an important early influence on his writing. Stone was four years his senior and came from one of Oxford's older families; he was passionate about literature and had already earned bachelor's degrees from Yale and the University of Mississippi. Faulkner also attended the latter, joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and pursued his dream to become a writer. Stone read and was impressed by some of Faulkner's early poetry, becoming one of the first to recognize and encourage Faulkner's talent. Stone mentored the young Faulkner, introducing him to the works of writers such as James Joyce, who influenced Faulkner's own writing. In his early 20s, Faulkner gave poems and short stories he had written to Stone in hopes of their being published. Stone would in turn send these to publishers, but they were uniformly rejected.^[11]

Cadet Faulkner in Toronto, 1918

The younger Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived. Mississippi marked his sense of humor, his sense of the tragic position of "black and white" Americans, his characterization of Southern characters, and his timeless themes, including fiercely intelligent people dwelling behind the façades of good ol' boys and simpletons. Unable to join the United States Army due to his height (he was 5' 5½"), Faulkner enlisted in a reservist unit of the British Army in Toronto.^[12] Despite his claims, records indicate that Faulkner was never actually a member of the British Royal Flying Corps and never saw active service during the First World War.^[13]