William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was one of the greatest American novelists, known for his astounding portrayal of 20 novels of the conflict between the old south and the new south.

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897, and was raised in nearby Oxford as the oldest of four sons of an old deep south family. He dropped out of high school, which he hated, to work in the bank that his grandfather owned in 1915. In World War I he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force but never saw action. Back in Oxford, he attended the University of Mississippi as a veteran but soon quit school to write, supporting himself with odd jobs.

Faulkner's first book, "The Marble Faun" (1924) was a collection of rather derivative poems that was privately printed. The next year, he moved to New Orleans, worked as a journalist and found a publisher for his first ever novel "Soldiers' Pay" (1926).

After a brief tour of Europe, he went home and began the series of florid, brooding novels set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. He peopled the town with his own ancestors, Indians, African Americans, shadowy backwoods hermits and loutish poor whites.

The year 1929 was crucial to Faulkner, the first of this series "Sartoris" (1929) was followed by "The Sound and the Fury", setting him up as a fully realized master of fiction.

He married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham the same year and chose to make his home in the small town of Oxford. Although many of his books were getting favorable reviews, only one sold well - "Sanctuary" (1931). The books success led to lucrative work as a Hollywood script writer.

In 1946, the critic Malcolm Cowley, worried that Faulkner was not well known or appreciated, put together "The Portable Faulkner", arranging extracts from Faulkner's novels. After this, Faulkner's works, having been long out of print, began to be reissued. No longer was he regarded as a regional strangeness but as a literary dynamo who finest writing held meaning far beyond the agonies and conflicts of his own troubled South.

His accomplishment was internationally recognized in 1949 when he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature. He continued to write novels and also short stories until his death on July 6, 1962, in Oxford. He died of a heart attack and was buried in St. Peter's Cemetery in Oxford, along with his family.