William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, Mississippi. Except for short periods elsewhere, Oxford remained his home for the rest of his life. He became one of the most celebrated figures in American literature, often considered the greatest writer of Southern literature and one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate.

Faulkner is best known for novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County, where he spent most of his life. After World War I, during which he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but did not serve in combat, he returned to Oxford and attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out. He moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1925). Back in Oxford, he wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work set in Yoknapatawpha County.

The years that followed brought the books most closely tied to his name. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The next year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Later in that decade came Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Wild Palms. Faulkner also worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks’s To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. To Have and Have Not, adapted from Ernest Hemingway’s novel, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.

His imagination was shaped early by Mississippi and by family history. As a boy, he listened to elders tell stories of the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Faulkner family. He was especially influenced by accounts of his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, a Confederate colonel, member of the Mississippi House, part-owner of a railroad, and a near legendary figure in North Mississippi. Faulkner later used many parts of that biography in his work. Mississippi also marked his sense of humor, his view of tragic relations between “black and white” Americans, and his portraits of Southern characters.

Another early influence was Phil Stone, whom Faulkner met at 17. Stone recognized his talent, encouraged his writing, and introduced him to writers such as James Joyce, whose work influenced Faulkner’s own. Faulkner’s reputation grew after Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner appeared in 1946. He received the Nobel Prize for “his powerful and unique contribution to the modern American novel,” and later won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962). He died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962, after a fall from his horse the month before.

Faulkner’s words still speak to readers because they come from a deep engagement with place, memory, conflict, and human courage. His line, “You cannot swim for new horizons until you have courage to lose sight of the shore,” fits the restless energy of a writer who kept returning to one county in Mississippi while making it large enough to hold a whole world.