Faulkner, William Cuthbert

(1897-1962)

   William Faulkner was one of the greatest southern writers of the 20th century. Born William Cuthbert Faulkner in Mississippi, he had a desultory education, worked in the family bank, and spent some time at the University of Mississippi. Rejected by the U.S. Army, Faulkner joined the British Royal Air Force in Canada in 1918. After the war, he studied at the University of Mississippi from 1919 to 1921 and published various poems and reviews. He earned a living as postmaster at the University until 1924. His first book, The Marble Faun, was published that year and was followed by many others, including Soldier’s Pay (1926), Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Intruder in the Dust (1948), Requiem for a Nun (1951), and The Reivers (1962). In many of his novels, he traced the decline of the Old South through the stories of fictional families in “Jefferson,” a composite Mississippi town in the mythical county of Yoknapatawpha.

   Despite his prodigious output, Faulkner was not widely known for some time but regarded as a southern “regional” writer. He supplemented his income from royalties by writing film scripts, contributing to the Howard Hawks’s movies To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). The publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 brought him to a wider audience. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950 “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” A Fable (1954) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, and The Reivers received the same award in 1963.