William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
(http://www.waterval
ley.net/yoknapatawph
apress/news.htm)
"Writing, to him, was what
living was all about. It was
hard on the people close to
him, but I don't think any of
them regret it now. . . . He was
not only a great writer, he was
a great example to other
writers in the way he lived his
life and went about doing his
work."
--Shelby Foote
(Blotner 1843)
William Faulkner
Photo Gallery
Pen and ink drawing by Faulkner
(http://www2.semo.edu/cfs/101/html)
(http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/faulkner/faulkner.html)
(http://www.pbs.org/ne
wshour/bb/entertainmen
t/julydec97/faulkner_926a.html)
William Faulkner
Photo Gallery
(http://www2.semo.edu/cfs/101/html)
(http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam312/wfhp.html)
(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainme
nt/july-dec97/faulkner_9-26a.html)
William Faulkner
1897
1902
1905
1906
1908
1914
1915
1916
1918
1919
1921
1924
1926
A Chronology
Born Sept. 25 in New Albany, Mississippi
Family moves to Oxford, Sept. 22
Enters first grade, Oxford Grade School
Skips to third grade
Possibly witnesses the lynching of a black man, Nelse Patton, on the square in
Oxford
Enters eleventh and final grade of Oxford High School, but drops out in
December
Returns to school to play football, and breaks his nose; quits school for good that
fall
Starts hanging out on University of Mississippi campus, and writes verse
influenced by Swinburne and Housman
Tries to enlist in U.S. Army; he is turned down
Accepted by the Canadian Royal Air Force as cadet. Discharged from RAF in
December and returns to Oxford
Poem "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" appears in The New Republic
Enters the University of Mississipi in September as a special student; begins
publishing poems in The Mississippian and the Oxford Eagle
Accepts a job as postmaster at the University of Mississippi post office
Removed as scoutmaster because of drinking
Resigns from post office because of charges brought by postal inspector
Soldiers' Pay published Feb. 25
William Faulkner
1927
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
A Chronology
Mosquitoes published April 30
Sartoris published Jan. 31
Estelle Franklin divorced; Faulkner marries her in College Hill, Miss., on June 20;
they honeymoon in Pascagoula until late summer
Takes job at university power plant in early fall
The Sound and the Fury published Oct. 7
Begins publishing stories in national magazines in April
Purchases house and land, naming it Rowan Oak
As I Lay Dying published Oct. 6
Sanctuary published Feb. 9
Arrives in Culver City, Calif., as MGM contract writer on May 7
Light in August published Oct. 6
Begins flying lessons Feb. 2
Daughter Jill born June 24
Pylon published March 25
Absalom, Absalom! published Oct. 26
Leaves on three-and-a-half-week trip to New York in mid-October, where he
suffers a severe back burn during a drinking spree
The Unvanquished published Feb.15, and screen rights are sold to MGM
The Wild Palms published Jan. 19
Mammy Caroline (Callie) Barr dies on Jan. 31, and Faulkner delivers eulogy
The Hamlet published April 1
William Faulkner
1942
1946
1948
1949
1950
1951
1954
1955
1957
1959
1962
A Chronology
Go Down, Moses published May 11
Begins five-month segment of a long-term Warner Brothers contract on July 26
Viking Press publishes The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley
Intruder in the Dust published Sept. 27
Knight's Gambit published Nov. 27
Notified on Nov. 8 he has won the Nobel Prize for Literature; he and Jill depart for
Stockholm, Sweden on Dec. 8
Goes to Hollywood in February for five weeks' scriptwriting for Howard Hawks
Receives National Book Award for Fiction in March for Collected Stories
Requiem for a Nun published Sept. 27
A Fable published Aug. 2
Accepts National Book Award for Fiction on Jan. 25 for A Fable
A Fable wins the Pulitzer Prize in May
Goes to University of Virginia Feb. 15 for second semester as writer-in-residence
The Town published May 1
Fractures right collarbone on March 14 in fall from horse in Charlottesville
The Mansion published Nov. 13
Injured in fall from horse on Jan. 3 in Charlottesville
The Reivers published June 4
Injured June 17 in fall from horse in Oxford
Dies of heart attack on July 6 at 1:30 a.m. He is buried in St. Peter's Cemetery in
Oxford on July 7
(http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/chronology.html)
William Faulkner
The Yoknapatawpha Saga
In Faulkner's home county of
Lafayette, Mississippi, is the
Yoknapatawpha Drainage District (Blotner
182). Faulkner borrowed the name for his
fictional county, closely patterned on
Lafayette, just as Jefferson, the county seat
of Yoknapatawpha County, is similar to
Faulkner's home town of Oxford.
Faulkner included a map of
Yoknapatawpha county when he published
Absalom, Absalom! in 1936; the map
reappeared in The Portable Faulkner as
well. On the map he wrote:
"Area, 2400 square miles. Population:
Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313. William
Faulkner, sole owner and proprietor."
(http://www2.semo.edu/cfs/101/html)
For another version of this map, see the Norton Critical
Edition, 2nd ed. [henceforth NCE2] 216-17.
William Faulkner
The Yoknapatawpha Saga
As "sole owner and proprietor," Faulkner created a history of Yoknapatawpha
County extending back into the days when the first white folks arrived, and he
peopled the county with families and characters who often appear in more than one
of his works.
Among the principal families Faulkner created are the Compsons of Sound and
the Fury fame, the McCaslins, the Sartorises, the Snopeses, the Stevenses, and the
Sutpens.
As I Lay Dying is somewhat unusual in that very few of the characters--and
none of the Bundrens--appear in other stories. (Dr. Peabody and Cora and Vernon
Tull are exceptions.)
However, the locales of the novel are familiar to readers of other Faulkner
novels.
(Brooks 447-52, 455, 459-60, 476,
484, 500.)
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
Writing the Novel
According to Joseph Blotner in his two-volume biography, Faulkner wrote the
novel in 47 days in the fall of 1929. At the time he was working the night shift at
the university power plant in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi. Things
generally quieted down around 11:00, and Faulkner wrote through the night until
quitting time at 4:00 a.m. (Blotner 633-34; 641).
Faulkner called As I Lay Dying "a deliberate book": "Before I ever put pen to
paper and set down the first word I knew what the last word would be and almost
where the last period would fall" (Blotner 634).
Faulkner also commented about this novel, "I took this family and subjected
them to the two greatest catastrophes which man can suffer--flood and fire, that's all.
That was simple tour de force" (Blotner 635). (No one ever said that Faulkner was
humble.)
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
The Title
The titles of some of Faulkner's greatest works are allusions: The Sound and
the Fury alludes to Macbeth's famous speech, Absalom, Absalom! to a passage in
the Bible--and As I Lay Dying to the scene in The Odyssey in which Agamemnon
tells Odysseus (who is visiting Hades on his way home to Penelope), "As I lay
dying the woman with the dog's eyes would not close my eyelids for me as I
descended into Hades" (Blotner 634-35).
The woman about whom Agamemnon is speaking is his wife, Clytemnestra,
who, with her lover, Aegisthus, killed Agamemnon when he returned from Troy. Of
course years before Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, so that the
gods would provide favorable winds for the Greek fleet to sail to Troy.
The allusion is a powerful one, reminding us of sacrifice and infidelity and
betrayal but also helping us to see that even in this family of dirt-poor Southerners
can be found a heroic measure of evil and good. The journey of the Bundrens', too,
is an odyssey. (Cleanth Brooks entitles his exegesis of the novel "Odyssey of the
Bundrens.")
William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying
An Innovative Novel
In the four sections of The Sound and the Fury, which was published in the fall
of 1929, Faulkner experiments with multiple narrators: three brothers (one of whom
is retarded) and an omniscient narrator. In As I Lay Dying he continues to
experiment with the novel's form; the title of each chapter identifies the narrator, and
fifteen different characters provide narration, some only once, some multiple times.
In this novel Faulkner also makes use of stream of consciousness, depicting the
thoughts of various characters. As he does so, he relies on what his biographer
Blotner calls "a kind of poetic license whereby a character's thoughts would be
rendered with syntax, diction, and figures of speech far beyond his literal
capabilities" (638). As Brooks notes, "The language with which the author provides
the character to express his innermost thoughts is not necessarily the same language
the author has him use when he speaks to another character" (160).
William Faulkner
Race
Race is an issue in nearly all of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels, and it is all too
easy for a modern reader of Faulkner's works to cringe at the frequent occurrence of
the n-word and the horribly distorted views that most of his white characters have
about his black characters. (Interestingly enough, it is not much of an issue in As I
Lay Dying.)
Furthermore, as Ernest Gaines noted in his address at the Southern Writers'
Conference in 1997, Faulkner never wrote about the kind of person Gaines is: a
highly educated, highly successful African American.
In the 1950s Faulkner was eager to add his voice to the national conversation on
race. Faulkner believed in integration, believed that the white Southern attitude
toward Negroes was "both doomed and wrong." But in "A Letter to the North," he
explained that, just as he had opposed compulsory segregation, so too he opposed
compulsory integration. Fearing bloodshed (and indeed a sort of echo of the Civil
War), he wrote, "Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment" (Blotner 1589). In
an interview in 1956, Faulkner added, "I will go on saying that the Southerners are
wrong and that their position is untenable, but if I have to make the same choice
Robert E. Lee made then I'll make it" (Blotner 1591).
William Faulkner
Race
Despite the prejudices of Faulkner's time and place, his fiction underscores the
humanity of black people. When someone asked if the characters in The Sound and
the Fury were good people, Faulkner responded, "I would call them tragic people.
The good people, Dilsey, the Negro woman, she was a good human being" (NCE2,
237). In a stunning story titled "Pantaloon in Black," Faulkner shows in stark relief
the inhumanity and inanity of the white characters' prejudice.
Furthermore, Faulkner was quick to acknowledge his
lifelong debt to Caroline Barr--Mammy Callie (pictured at
right)--who joined the family when Faulkner was five and
became a kind of grandmother to him. When she died, he
said in his eulogy, "As surely as there is a heaven, Mammy
will be in it" (Blotner 1035). In 1942 he dedicated Go Down,
Moses to Mammy: "Who was born in slavery and who gave
to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of
recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion
and love" (Blotner 1094).
When Faulkner received $30,000 for winning the Nobel
Prize, he gave around $3000 to help a young black man from
Oxford earn his degrees (Blotner 1371).
(http://www2.semo.edu/cfs/101.html)
William Faulkner
The Nobel Prize Address
Stockholm, December 10, 1950
(http://www.mcsr.olemi
ss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/t
rivia.html#nobel)
I feel that this award was not made to me as a
man, but to my work—a life's work in the agony
and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and
least of all for profit, but to create out of the
materials of the human spirit something which did
not exist before. So this award is only mine in
trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for
the money part of it commensurate with the
purpose and significance of its origin. But I would
like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using
this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be
listened to by the young men and women already
dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among
whom is already that one who will some day stand
where I am standing.
William Faulkner
The Nobel Prize Address
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by
now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is
only one question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or
woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict
with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing
about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is
to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his
workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal
truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity
and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse.
He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of
value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His
griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but
of the glands.
William Faulkner
The Nobel Prize Address
Until he learns these things, he will write as though he stood among and
watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say
that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of
doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last
red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his
puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will
not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among
creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of
compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write
about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by
reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and
pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not
merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him
endure and prevail.
William Faulkner
The Nobel Prize Address
The Trip to Sweden
Stories abound about Faulkner's journey to Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize.
At first he refused to go, implying that he needed to tend to his farm. Once the
members of his family convinced him, they worried about sobering him up in time
for the event. (Faulkner struggled with alcoholism throughout his life.) As Blotner
says in his biography, "someone hit on the ruse of setting the calendar ahead" so that
Faulkner would sober up early (1350). He discovered the plot--but managed to
make the trip nonetheless.
He also decided to rent a suit for the event rather than buy one; then he decided
he'd like to keep it. His publishers bought it for him.
During the ceremony almost no one could hear Faulkner's speech--he was too
far from the microphone, and he spoke softly and rapidly. Once the speech was
published, it became perhaps the best known of all the Nobel laureates' acceptance
speeches.
(Blotner 1341-1371)
William Faulkner
Faux Faulkner Contest
Begun in 1989 by Faulkner's niece, the Faux Faulkner Contest is currently
sponsored by The Yoknapatawpha Press, The University of Mississippi's Center for
the Study of Southern Culture, and the Jack Daniel Distillery. The contest is an
annual event, with the winning piece and the two runners-up published in The
Faulkner Newsletter and also in The Paris Review (along with the winners of the
International Imitation Hemingway Contest).
Entries should be no more than 500 words. The contest winner receives two
passes to the annual Faulkner Conference, held at the University of Mississippi
every summer, as well as transportation to the conference and lodging.
The Yoknapatawpha Press has the following suggestions for people interested
in entering the contest:
"The successful parodist will have read and studied Faulkner's work and have
absorbed Faulkner's style and syntax and developed a feel for his dense sentence
and paragraph structure. . . . Contest semi-finalists typically will select a Faulkner
character and place him in a comic situation of their own devising, such as having
Flem Snopes sell Yugoslavian automobiles ('Yugo Down, Moses') or play to a single
idea, such as making Benjy the 'dummy' in a bridge game, or build to a single
famous punchline, such as Faulkner's self-parodying 'Between scotch and
William Faulkner
Faux Faulkner Contest
nothing, I'll take scotch.' Irreverent wit and humor are prerequisites, though most
parodists season their entries with a dash of grace and humility. After all, nobody
can really write like William Faulkner!"
(http://www.watervalley.net/yoknapatawphapress/contest.htm)
Here, for example, is the first sentence of the 1992 winner mentioned above,
"Yugo Down, Moses":
"Perhaps it wasn't that they wouldn't run, for they would for a while but poorly
and fitfully, and he knew that it wasn't that he had bought one of them from him, he
who had brought them to town and parcelled off part of his dealership with its lights
neon and o'erarching that glowed into the night, the four old familiar blue letters
'Ford' now transcended by four foreign letters drawing moths and men insomnolent
to gaze at something not assembled by the sons of immigrants in Flint or Dearborn
but slap-welded tenuously in Kragujevac by the sons of Tito to be toted to American
towns myriad where auto mechanics myriad too would scoff, 'You bought a what?!'"
William Faulkner
Resources
Principal sources used in preparing this presentation
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. Random House: NY, 1974.
Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. Yale University
Press: New Haven, 1963.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed.
Edited by David Minter. Norton: New York, 1994.
Padgett, John B. William Faulkner on the Web.
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html
William Faulkner Reading Nobel Prize Speech, etc. Caedmon Records TC 1035.
1954.
Recommended readings in the Norton Critical Edition (2nd ed.)
William Faulkner. Selected Letters (218-222).
William Faulkner. Two introductions for The Sound and the Fury (225-232).
William Faulkner. Interviews (232-237).
Irving Howe. "Faulkner and the Negroes" (272-75).
Cleanth Brooks. "Man, Time, and Eternity" (289-297).
David Minter. "Faulkner, Childhood, and the Making of The Sound and the Fury
(343-358).
William Faulkner
Resources
Helpful web sites
Center for Faulkner Studies. http://www2.semo.edu/cfs/collect.html
Faulkner Home Page. http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/enam312/wfhp.html
MWP [Mississippi Writers Project]: William Faulkner (1897-1962).
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/faulkner_william/
William Faulkner Foundation, France. http://www.uhb.fr/Faulkner/
William Faulkner on the Web.
http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/~egjbp/faulkner/faulkner.html (This is one of the
deepest and richest web sites I have ever seen.)
Yoknapatawpha Press. http://www.watervalley.net/yoknapatawphapress/