William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, and grew up in Oxford, the town that would become the template for his fiction. His great-grandfather, a Confederate colonel, railroad builder and novelist, hung over the family as legend. Faulkner left school early, trained briefly with the Royal Air Force in Canada at the end of the First World War without seeing action, and drifted through a spell at the University of Mississippi and a notoriously inattentive tenure as the university’s postmaster. In New Orleans, Sherwood Anderson encouraged his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay.

With Flags in the Dust, published in shortened form as Sartoris, he discovered Yoknapatawpha County, the ‘little postage stamp of native soil’ in which most of his fiction is set. A sustained burst followed: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Through shifting narrators, streams of consciousness and sentences that seem to hold whole generations in suspension, these books trace the decline of families, the long afterlife of slavery and the weight of a past that, as one of his characters puts it, is never dead. Commercial success came slowly; he supported himself with stories for magazines and years of screenwriting in Hollywood.

By the mid-1940s nearly all his novels were out of print. Malcolm Cowley’s anthology The Portable Faulkner (1946) helped restore his standing, and the Nobel Prize for 1949, awarded in 1950, confirmed it; his brief banquet speech became one of the most quoted statements of a writer’s faith in humanity. He later won Pulitzer Prizes for A Fable and The Reivers and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He died in 1962. His influence, from the American South to Latin America, has been profound.