Regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, William Faulkner relentlessly chronicled the condition of the antebellum American Deep South. Creating characters and stories within the fictional Yoknapatawpha County and beyond, Faulkner seamlessly blended the harsh realities of the southern condition with rich cultural histories of his own imagination.
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897. His first book, a collection of poems entitled The Marble Faun, was published in 1924. The Sound and the Fury (1929), his debut as a novelist, is widely regarded as his masterpiece. The novel documents the tragic history of the Compson family from the perspective of three of the families' children (including mentally handicapped Benji). The deterioration of this aristocratic Southern family mirrors the downfall of an Old South bewildered by changing customs and values. The next decade was a prolific one for Faulkner, partially because of his financial insecurity. He was forced to alternate between stories he wanted to write and stories he knew would sell. Sanctuary (1931), for example, was a commercially viable detective story, while Absolom, Absolom (1936), is the epic story of a ruthless plantation owner (Thomas Sutpen) and the young man who, a century later, is obsessed with Sutpen's legacy and its implications on his own life and heritage. This was Faulkner's favorite of his own books. Despite his motivations for writing them, all of Faulkner's novels and stories exhibit a deft mastery of his craft. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and, later, the Pulitzer Prize for The Fable (1954) and, posthumously, The Reivers (1962). Other Faulkner classics include As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and the often-anthologized short stories A Rose for Emily and That Evening Sun. Late in his career, Faulkner ventured out to Hollywood and attempted a career as a screenwriter, adapting the novels of contemporaries Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway for the screen. William Faulkner died of a heart attack in Byhalia, Mississippi, on July 6, 1962.
Though he is commonly known to have been a sometimes-volatile alcoholic, Faulkner managed to keep his rocky personal life from tarnishing his reputation as one of the greatest American writers in history. Read in classrooms throughout the world, and recently reintroduced to millions as a part of Oprah Winfrey's book club, Faulkner has also gained a reputation for being a difficult read, presumably because of his affinity for long sentences. However, his complex interwoven themes of lost innocence, despair, and redemption resonate just as strongly today as modern readers recognize a similar cultural dissolution in their own world.
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