William Faulkner, say the name, and you're immediately
dropped into this world of dusty Mississippi
history, dense, almost suffocating prose, and
family tragedies so tangled they seem to defy
time itself. They really do. He's one of the
20th century's most celebrated, influential,
and let's be honest, most intensely challenging
American writers. Absolutely. He is, without
much exaggeration, the writer who laid the foundation
for Basically all serious Southern literature
that came after them. Right. But for a figure
of such monumental genius, his biography is just
a cascade of contradictions. It's really kind
of amazing. I mean, we're talking about a high
modernist genius who failed to graduate from
high school. And a literary giant who told these
incredible tall tales about being a decorated
war hero, but he never even saw combat. Exactly.
And this fiercely private artist who then spends
years, reluctantly, working as a Hollywood screenwriter
just to keep his family afloat. It's that contradiction
that's so fascinating. Our source material today
gives us this dense chronological and thematic
breakdown of his very complex life and work.
So our mission in this Deep Dives is to unpack
these massive contradictions. We want to reveal
how a man with such profound, you know, personal
flaws and eccentricities, managed to create this
universal human landscape. We're tracing his
journey from rural Oxford, Mississippi, all the
way to the Nobel Prize stage. And while we do
that, we're going to try to understand how he
constructed his greatest, most monumental fictional
creation, the entirely self -contained world
he called Yokonapatawpha County. That county,
Yokonapatawpha, is the single most crucial concept
to understanding Faulkner. It's an intensely
detailed, contained world, a fictionalized version
of his own hometown, Lafayette County, Mississippi.
He fantasily called it his postage stamp. of
soil. Exactly. Just 2400 square miles with an
initial population of, I think, 15 ,611 persons.
He specified it on a map he drew himself. That's
incredible detail. It is. And onto that tiny
piece of earth, he managed to impose the entire
tragic history of the South, fitting every possible
dimension of the human condition, racial strife,
tragedy, comedy, history, violence onto it. So
let's unpack the man who built that world. OK,
so we have to begin with the roots. William Faulkner
was born William Cuthbert Faulkner with a K in
New Albany in 1897, but he was raised in Oxford,
Mississippi. And the sources note his family
was part of the upper middle class, but they
were, and this is a key phrase, not quite of
the old feudal cotton aristocracy. So they were
comfortable, but they didn't have that ancient
social standing of the decaying families he'd
later write about, like the Compsons or the Sartoraces.
That position is so instructive, isn't it? It
gave him an insider's view of the social hierarchy,
but he was still slightly detached. He was an
observer, not a full participant in the Old South's
self -mythology. And his childhood was just steeped
in the oral history of his elders. We're talking
stories that span the Civil War, the brutal legacy
of slavery, and even the history of the Ku Klux
Klan. He was inheriting a history that was heavy,
unresolved, and incredibly dramatic. And the
greatest influence on this inherited drama was
definitely his paternal great -grandfather namesake,
William Clark Faulkner, the colonel. The colonel.
I mean, this figure is ripped straight from Southern
mythology. He was a genuine frontier archetype.
Born into poverty, right. And worked his way
up. Worked his way up to become a Confederate
colonel, a strict disciplinarian. His life was
just marked by extreme violence and ambition.
The sources detail how he was tried and acquitted
not once but twice on charges of murder. Twice.
Twice. Before he was ultimately murdered himself
by a former business partner in a street gun
fight. You can't make this up. He built a railroad,
founded a town. And wrote a hugely popular romantic
novel, The White Rose of Memphis. The man's life
story is literally the blueprint for the great
tragic Southern families Faulkner wrote about.
Absolutely. The ambition, the rise and the tragic
sudden fall. It's all there. It's the immediate
genesis of Colonel John Sartoris in Sartoris
and Absalom. Absalom. His influence permeates
the entire narrative of Southern decline and
inherited guilt that defines Yukhnepetoffa. So
for Faulkner, history wasn't just some backdrop.
It was a living, inescapable burden passed down
through the generations. Exactly. Which is what
makes his own formal education so ironic. It
was almost the opposite of his literary output,
disorganized, and frankly... It's one of the
great ironies. The man who crafted some of the
most complex sentences in the English language
never formally completed high school. He showed
early promise. He skipped the second grade. But
by his mid -teens, he just became withdrawn.
He spent his time wandering or reading on his
own. And he repeated both the 11th and 12th grades,
yet still never got a diploma. And when he went
to college, it wasn't much better. His experience
at Ole Miss, the University of Mississippi, was,
well, it was short. He enrolled in 1919 for just
three semesters. Right. And he could attend under
a special provision for veterans, which is a
whole other layer of myth -making we'll get to.
He was pursuing his dream of being a poet. He
did get some early poems published on campus,
but his academic record was disastrous. He skipped
classes habitually, avoided any courses that
required serious effort, and notoriously received
a D grade in English composition. a D in English.
It's the ultimate badge of honor for a self -taught
genius who just rejected institutional metrics.
It really is. And you have to layer on top of
this the emotional landscape that shaped him,
specifically the story of his lost love, Estelle
Oldham. This was hugely formative for his early
sort of romantic worldview. Definitely. Faulkner
dated her as a teenager, and she was clearly
the great love of his youth, the woman he assumed
he would marry. But Estelle came from a much
more socially prominent family. And in 1918,
before Faulkner could even propose, she accepted
an offer from someone else. Cornell Franklin,
an only Miss Law grad who was older, much more
financially secure, and from a well -respected
family. She married stability and social acceptance,
leaving Faulkner behind. And that rejection.
The loss of the idealized Southern belle must
have fed directly into the tragic romantic themes
in his work. Oh, absolutely. It fuels that idea
of unrequited love and the destructive power
of societal expectations that you see all over
The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom.
Okay, so before we get to the novels themselves,
we have to talk about the man who first showed
him the path to genius. Phil Stone. Yes. Faulkner
is often seen as this lone artistic wolf, but
he had a crucial mentor there in Oxford. And
Phil Stone sounds like the perfect antidote to
Faulkner's chaotic education. He was four years
older. Yale educated. And he saw Faulkner's raw
talent almost immediately. Stone was his literary
bridge. He didn't just encourage Faulkner's poetry.
He actively mentored him. He gave him the sophisticated
literary education that the university failed
to provide. And crucially, he introduced him
to the revolutionary high modernist writers of
the day. Especially James Joyce. That exposure
was the single most important factor in Faulkner's
stylistic shift away from the Victorian romanticism
of his early poems toward the fragmentation and
complexity that would define his greatest work.
Stone also championed him relentlessly, even
when he was completely unknown. He did. He made
repeated, strenuous efforts to get Faulkner's
early work published, but the industry was just
not ready for him. The sources confirm he was
met with uniform rejection. So Faulkner spent
his early 20s as an aspiring poet who couldn't
get any traction at all. None. And that experience,
that complete lack of commercial success for
his preferred art form, is vital to understanding
the defiance he adopted later. And speaking of
defiance and rejection, let's pivot to the most
famous piece of Faulknerian myth -making, his
invented military career during World War I.
This is where he truly begins to write himself
into existence. This is maybe the most incredible
contradiction of his youth. He tried to join
the U .S. Army but was rejected. Why was that?
The sources cite two possible reasons. His short
stature, he was only 5 '5", and being chronically
underweight. So undeterred, he set his sights
on the British Royal Flying Corps. The glamour
of an officer's commission. Exactly. But he ended
up in the Royal Canadian Air Force, the RAFC,
in 1918, and the process itself was part of the
performance. He enlisted with a forged letter
of reference, right? A forged letter pretending
to be this polished, anglicized young man he
felt he needed to be. He served a mere 179 days
and was discharged at the war's end. And the
critical details are that he never got cockpit
training, never flew a plane solo, and never
saw active service. Not a single day overseas.
Yet when he returned to Oxford in December 1918,
he had fully invented his past. He told these
elaborate war stories, spoke with a fake British
accent. And famously faked a war wound, sometimes
using a silver plate under his cap to simulate
a head injury. It was a magnificent piece of
immersive performance art. It tells you something
profound about the writer. Faulkner was not satisfied
with the reality he was given. If reality wouldn't
provide the heroism he craved, he just constructed
himself. Exactly. This intense psychological
need to create a history, to build a compelling
narrative even for his own life, is fundamentally
linked to his later literary output. I mean,
you have to wonder, was his need to fabricate
his own past what enabled him to create an entire
fictional county? later on. It's a compelling
link. And that desire to create his own identity
even extended to his surname. The change from
Faulkner to Faulkner. The common anecdote, and
it's a delightful one, is that a careless typesetter
made the error on his first book, Soldiers Pay.
And he allegedly just said, either way suits
me. Right. With characteristic indifference.
But the sources also have this crucial piece
of historical evidence. His 1918 attestation
papers for the RAFC. already list his name as
Faulkner. Ah, so the change probably happened
earlier to aid the deception and give himself
a more anglicized, military -appropriate identity.
It seems likely. It might have been less about
an indifferent artist and more about a calculated
shift to support the fabricated persona of the
British officer. He was already rehearsing the
idea that the name he was given wasn't as important
as the name he created for himself. So after
this brief manufactured military career and his
withdrawal from Ole Miss, he tried a string of
odd jobs. He did. He worked in a New York City
bookstore as a house painter, a carpenter. Culminating
in his famous short -lived stint as the Ole Miss
postmaster. And this provides one of his most
satisfying declarations of artistic independence.
He was appointed postmaster in 1921 and lasted
just over two years. By 1923, he had clearly
reached his limit with public service. He resigned
with a memo that just perfectly crystallized
his contempt for the demands of the average person.
He declared, I will be damned if I propose to
be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel
who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp.
It's a magnificent act of defiance, isn't it?
He was refusing to be subservient to the mundane
demands of reality. That decision, that visceral
rejection of serving the public in small ways,
was the prerequisite for turning inward and focusing
on the monumental task of creating Yoko no Patafa.
He closed the door on the real world to build
a better, if more tragic, fictional one. Exactly.
So the post office resignation provided the freedom,
and then 1925 provided the spark. faulkner moves
to the french quarter in new orleans which was
an absolute hub of bohemian artists at the time
this transition was fundamental new orleans gave
him a literary community and critically his focus
shifted dramatically from poetry to prose his
style began its necessary transition from that
flowery victorian prose toward hard -edged experimental
modernism and his first published novel soldiers
pay reflects that shift. Very much so. It was
heavily influenced by Sherwood Anderson, who
was instrumental in getting it published. But
the true invention, the moment he created his
universe, came with flags in the dust. Written
in 1927, this was his first novel entirely set
in the fictional county. This was the moment
he stopped writing about his fabricated war experiences
and decided to fully explore the profound, traumatic
legacy of the Civil War and the American South.
And the sources say Faulkner was immensely proud
of this work. He saw it as a huge leap forward.
Yet, once again, the establishment rejected him.
Rejected by Boney and Liveright. It left Faulkner
feeling devastated and misunderstood. He eventually
and reluctantly let his agent, Ben Wasson, perform
a heavy edit. Pruning nearly a quarter of the
text, simplifying structures. Right. And it was
published as Sartoris in 1929. The original sprawling
text was considered so integral to his vision
that the full manuscript, Flags in the Dust,
was later restored and published. It shows you
just how much the early editors had missed. And
the rejection of Flags in the Dust led directly
to his most experimental masterpiece. The Sound
and the Fury. Yes, this is the classic tale of
the artist throwing up their hands and creating
something purely internal, unconcerned with commercial
success. The frustration freed him. In the autumn
of 1928, after the Flags of the Dust fiasco,
he achieved this complete indifference to his
publishers. And he famously declared to himself,
One day I seemed to shut the door between me
and all publishers' addresses and book lists.
I said to myself, now I can write. That quote
is so powerful because it marks the birth of
his uncompromising aesthetic. He began The Sound
and the Fury initially as a series of three short
stories about the decaying Compson family. That
quickly expanded into a novel structured in four
distinct sections, each narrated by a different
character, each using a completely different
style. And he was so determined to maintain the
integrity of this vision that he insisted his
agent perform no editing and... Critically, add
no punctuation for clarity in that notoriously
fragmented opening section. None at all. And
the subsequent saga that really fleshed out Yerkinapatawpha
was the extended trilogy focused on the rise
of the Snopes family. The Snopes trilogy. That's
the hamlet, the town, and the mansion. Right.
And this is essential for understanding the historical
movement of the county. If the Compsons and Sartorises
represent the beautiful, tragic, decaying, old
aristocracy burdened by history, the Snopes family,
led by the ruthless Flem Snopes, represents the
exact opposite. They're the new, rapacious, materialistic,
working -class modern South. Precisely. Their
relentless insinuation into the county seat of
Jefferson symbolizes the transition from a society
rooted in feudal history to one driven purely
by avarice and modern capitalism. So Yolk to
Botafo wasn't just... a place. It was a dynamic
stage where he could play out the entire transformation
of the South across generations. With these families
serving as historical symbols. Exactly. Okay,
let's talk about the style that makes Faulkner
so notoriously dense, but artistically undeniable.
We know the key phrase is stream of consciousness,
but for those who haven't read him, what does
that actually look like on the page? Faulkner's
style is meticulous, intense, and often infused
with gothic or grotesque elements. But stream
of consciousness is the defining hallmark. Unlike
a traditional narrative that tells you what happened,
Faulkner's stream of consciousness pulls you
into the raw, unedited, fragmented internal experience
of the character. Where time and memory are often
just collapsed. Completely collapsed. Take the
opening section of The Sound and the Fury, narrated
by Benji Compson, who is intellectually disabled.
Because Benji can't perceive time chronologically,
a reference to a smell, a sound, or an image
instantly transports the narrative across decades,
from 1928 to 1910 to 1900, and back again with
no warning. No quotation marks, nothing. Nothing.
The narrative functions by associative logic,
not linear time. He'll write a scene where an
adult Benji is watching golfers, and the sight
of their white pants instantly triggers a memory
of his sister Caddy's muddy drolls from 30 years
earlier. You, the reader, experience the past
and present simultaneously, filtered through
the character's internal agony. That makes the
technical difficulty really palpable. It requires
you to constantly reconstruct the timeline yourself.
It's exhausting. but so rewarding. It is. And
he took that multi -perspective technique even
further with As I Lay Dying. The 1930 novel,
this one is structurally revolutionary. We're
talking 59 different narrators. But what's critical
is that these narrators are often unreliable,
highly biased, and sometimes... They're deceased.
The narrative is divided into 59 short chapters,
often just a few sentences long, voiced by 15
different characters. And he uses this fragmented
chorus to describe the Bundren family's journey
to bury their matriarch, Addie. Right. So if
The Sound and the Fury dealt with the inner mental
anguish of one family, as I Lay Dying expands
that to cover an entire community. He essentially
democratized perspective. By giving a voice,
even an unreliable one, to every member of the
family and even the townspeople they meet. Exactly.
You, the reader, are forced to piece together
the truth of the narrative from 59 competing
subjective realities. It's a collective stream
of consciousness. It forces you to constantly
question whose truth you're experiencing. This
intense, dense style. stood in stark contrast
to his contemporaries, particularly Ernest Hemingway.
Oh, absolutely. The sources highlight this contract
perfectly. Hemingway prioritized minimalist understatement,
short declarative sentences focusing on surface
action. Faulkner was the opposite, maximalist,
baroque, dense. And this difference contributed
to the mixed critical reception of his work,
which was initially viewed by many critics as
impenetrably convoluted. They often mistook the
non -linear structure for mere raw slabs of pseudo
-realism that had relatively little merit as
serious writing. They were looking for a clear,
straightforward plot, and Faulkner gave them
a narrative that was frequently anti -plot. It
revolved instead around internal thought, fragmented
time, and linguistic intensity. He just wasn't
operating on the established plane of realism
most critics were accustomed to. It's remarkable
that a writer so revolutionary had such a classical
foundation. Who were the old friends, as he called
them, that he kept returning to? His foundation
was massive and deeply classical. He cited the
Old Testament, which gave him much of that biblical
cadence and intensity. Also, giants like Dickens,
Conrad, Flaubert, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy,
and of course Shakespeare. Let's focus on the
influence of Balzac for a second. That seems
crucial. essential because of Balzac's comédie
humaine, his massive multi -novel cycle depicting
French society. Faulkner deeply admired how Balzac
created an intact world where characters and
families recurred across dozens of books. Giving
the impression of a single coherent reality existing
outside any single novel. Exactly. Faulkner took
that concept and just reduced the scale dramatically
to his postage stamp of Yocna Potapha, creating
the same illusion of eternal interconnected history
within that small county. And the detail that
he read Cervantes' Don Quixote every single year.
That strikes me as particularly revealing. Why
Quixote? Well, Don Quixote is a satire about
a man who clings to an idealized, chivalric past,
despite the brutal modernity of his reality.
And when you think about Faulkner's primary subject
matter, these aristocratic Southern families
like the Compsons, clinging to the romantic lost
cause of the antebellum South, the connection
is profound. He was constantly writing about
noble ideals corrupted by modern necessity, a
theme Quixote embodies perfectly. It's a perfect
match. And that classical foundation shines through
in his titles, which he often drew directly from
literary history, but then subverted or grounded
in contemporary Southern despair. Like The Sound
and the Fury. Drawn from Macbeth's soliloquy
on the futility of life. A tale told by an idiot
full of sound and fury signifying nothing. Faulkner
applies this classical tragedy to the Compson
family, whose decline is narrated by the idiot,
Benji. And As I Lay Dying also comes from a profoundly
ancient source. Homer's Odyssey. The phrase is
part of the speech given by the ghost of Agamemnon
to Odysseus in the underworld, describing his
murder by his wife. As I lay dying, the woman
with the dog's eyes would not close my eyes as
I descended into Hades. He uses this phrase of
ancient betrayal and descent. and applies it
to a journey of poor white southerners carrying
a decaying corpse across the Mississippi landscape.
It elevates their desperate, absurd situation
to the level of classical epic. And the dedication
of Go Down, Moses, is equally powerful, linking
the classical to the personal history of his
family and the South. Go Down, Moses takes its
title from the African -American spiritual, and
the book itself is dedicated to Mammy Caroline
Barr, who was born into slavery and who was a
huge part of his childhood. It shows the complex,
interwoven history of his family and the people
they enslaved, placing that history firmly within
a spiritual, historical and biblical epic. So
for the listener attempting to engage with this
highly rewarding but notoriously dense prose,
what was Faulkner's famous uncompromising advice?
When asked in a 1956 interview what approach
readers should take if they couldn't understand
his work after two or three reads, his response
was characteristically blunt and defiant. Read
it four times. Read it four times. It underscores
his belief that the work demanded the reader
meet the text on its own terms, without compromise.
That defiant commitment to artistic integrity
faced a brutal reality check, though, in the
form of financial necessity. It really did. In
1929, Faulkner finally married Estelle Oldham,
the great love of his youth, support a blended
family, which included their daughter Jill, born
in 1933. And high art, unfortunately, rarely
pays the bills quickly. This financial need fundamentally
drove his career in the early 1930s. It did.
It fueled the production of one of his most sensational
and crucially commercially successful. early
works sanctuary published in 1931 and faulkner
was quite candid that this novel was explicitly
fueled by a desire to make money it has sensational
themes of violence and transgression which grabbed
public attention though critics were initially
wary and he also started publishing short stories
in high -paying magazines like the saturday evening
post right to supplement his income but by 1932
even these efforts weren't enough the great writer
hit a wall he desperately needed income he had
just finished light in august and needed about
$5 ,000 immediately. So he asked his agent to
sell the serialization rights for the novel to
a magazine, a standard practice. But every major
publication turned him down. With literally no
income stream, he had no choice but to accept
the offer of a screenwriting job from MGM Studios
in Hollywood. It was a forced migration. And
this is one of the most tragic and fascinating
paradoxes of his life. The uncompromising architect
of Yoknapatawpha. The man who refused to be commanded
by the two -cent postage stamp suddenly selling
his time to the ultimate commercial machine.
The dilemma was agonizing. Faulkner deeply resented
the movie industry. He detested the commercialism,
the collaborative nature of the work, the entire
cultural environment. He called Hollywood a cultural
Babylon. and wrote letters back home that were
just scathing in tone about his predicament.
Yet he endured this imprisonment from 1932 through
1954 because it provided the consistent, substantial
salary that supported his family back in Oxford.
A Faustian bargain he continually regretted,
but accepted. And his initial arrival in Hollywood
just underscores how disinterested he was in
the industry he was joining. It led to that classic
Faulknerian absurdity. Upon his arrival at MGM,
he declared quite seriously that he wanted to
work on Mickey Mouse. Apparently unaware that
Walt Disney Productions produced them, not MGM.
He was looking for any way out of the narrative
demands of live action filmmaking. He thought
cartoons might be simpler or maybe more artistically
pure. Despite his profound unhappiness, he was
incredibly productive, working on around 50 films
over two decades. And he did find one essential
professional ally, the director Howard Hawks.
Hawks and Faulkner shared a deep bond, primarily
centered on interest outside of filmmaking, drinking,
hunting, and a general disdain for the intellectual
pretension of Hollywood. And this friendship
was the engine behind some of his best -known
screenwriting contributions. Two of which stand
out as film noir classics. Let's start with To
Have and Have Not in 1944. An adaptation of Ernest
Hemingway's novel. And here's a phenomenal piece
of literary trivia. To Have and Have Not is the
only film in history with screenwriting contributions
by two authors who are also Nobel laureates,
Faulkner and Hemingway. The fact that those two
literary giants with their famously adversarial
relationship and diametrically opposed styles
collaborated on a single commercial script is
just staggering. It really is. And his other
major noir contribution, The Big Sleep from 1946,
was adapted from Raymond Chandler's novel. That
must have been a stylistic challenge, moving
from the dense internal monologues of Yolkna
Patafa to the terse, hard -boiled dialogue of
Marlowe. A huge shift. But he found a way to
apply his sense of atmosphere and complexity
to the genre. He was excellent at structure and
dialogue, even if he found the whole endeavor
tedious. He found ways to survive the experience.
often adopting this vagrant lifestyle in hotels
like the famous Garden of Allah. Right, and he
was known to disappear for long stretches, preferring
to write on his own schedule back in Oxford when
he could. And we get that great colorful anecdote
about his bar habits at Musso and Frank Grill.
It's iconic. He was such a regular fixture at
the bar that he was known to go behind the counter
himself to mix his own signature, carefully constructed
mint juleps. It's a wonderful visual contrast.
The austere southern gentleman, the architect
of profound tragedy, casually mixing his own
perfect drink in the heart of Tinseltown's chaos.
It shows the private world he maintained even
in the face of commercial necessity. It was also
during this period that he had a significant
extramarital affair with Metta Carpenter, who
was Howard Hawk's secretary and script girl.
So the 1940s brought global conflict, and we
see another example of Faulkner trying to inject
himself into the military structure he missed
in WWI. In 1942, during World War II, he once
again tried to join the U .S. Air Force, but
was rejected, likely due to his age and health
issues related to heavy drinking. So he focused
his energy on local civil defense efforts in
Mississippi. Right. But creatively, the sources
note he found the conflict bad for writing, which
led to a slowdown in his fiction output. And
yet out of that wartime period came one of his
most massive, if controversial, undertakings,
a fable. This novel was a huge project, spanning
over a decade of conception and writing. What
was the central premise that made it so divisive
for the Pulitzer Prize? A fable was published
in 1954, and it was a highly complex allegory
that merged the story of the unknown soldier
in WWI with the passion of Christ. It posits
that a corporal and his 12 followers mutiny on
the French front, symbolically mirroring Christ
and the disciples, forcing a temporary stop to
the fighting. It was massive in scope, but structurally
and thematically very challenging. And this challenging,
ambitious novel won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for
Fiction. But the sources make it clear that the
selection was rife with political drama. High
drama. The Pulitzer jury. The readers who actually
assessed the book's merit had initially selected
a different novel. Milton Lott's The Last Hunt.
The jury explicitly felt a fable was a lesser
work compared to Faulkner's earlier classics,
but the Pulitzer board, which oversees the jury,
felt differently. The board administrator, Professor
John Hohenberg, essentially convinced the board
to overrule the jury's selection. Exactly. They
were honoring his entire body of work rather
than the specific quality of a fable. They argued
that Faulkner was long overdue for the honor.
So it was a clear political move by the board
to elevate this American giant, regardless of
the quality of the nominated work. Precisely.
And this decision caused considerable disgust
among the jury members who felt their critical
independence had been sacrificed to institutional
recognition. And that institutional recognition
was perhaps overdue, especially since by the
mid 1940s, his domestic reputation was actually
quite shaky. It's astonishing to realize by the
time Malcolm Calley published The Portable Faulkner
in 1946, most of Faulkner's major novels had
actually gone out of print in the U .S. So this
collection. which provided accessible selections
and crucial introductory essays, was instrumental
in reviving his standing at home. It was. It
really paved the way for the ultimate international
recognition that followed very quickly after.
That ultimate recognition arrived in 1950, when
William Faulkner was formally awarded the 1949
Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and
artistically unique contribution to the modern
American novel. He is still the only Mississippi
born Nobel laureate. And this crowning achievement
instantly clashed with the core of his personality,
his deep, intense aversion to fame, glory and
the public spotlight. The way his own daughter
found out about the award is probably the best
illustration of this. It's a perfect anecdote.
His 17 -year -old daughter, Jill, only discovered
she was the daughter of a Nobel laureate when
she was pulled out of class to the principal's
office to handle the sudden crush of media attention.
And Faulkner himself avoided the ceremony initially.
He only relented after friends convinced him
it was an important duty. But the acceptance
speech he gave in Stockholm is legendary. It
defined his entire artistic philosophy. He began
by clearly distinguishing the award from the
man. He said the award was given to his work,
a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human
spirit. And he defined the writer's job as attempting
to create out of the materials of the human spirit
something which did not exist before. He viewed
the award, especially the prize money, not as
personal wealth, but as a sacred trust. And he
took tangible action based on that philosophy.
He created a fund for emerging writers. He used
a portion of the Nobel money to establish a fund
to support and encourage new fiction writers.
This ultimately evolved into the William Faulkner
Foundation, and after it dissolved in 1970, its
mission inspired the creation of the prestigious
P .N. Faulkner Award for Fiction. Directly linking
his legacy to nurturing future generations. And
in his final years, he eventually embraced a
role that allowed him to teach and maintain some
privacy. Right. From 1957 to 1958, he served
as the first writer in residence at the University
of Virginia. A role that gave him structure without
demanding too much public interaction. His final
novel, The Reavers, was published in 1962, just
before his death. It was nostalgic, almost lighthearted.
A reminiscence about an elderly grandfather relating
the humorous tale of stealing a car to drive
to a Memphis brothel. It was a much lighter,
more accessible note on which to conclude his
career. He died later that same year, 1962, at
age 64. Following a fall from his horse the month
prior, which led to thrombosis. He passed away
from a fatal heart attack at a sanatorium. He
died as privately as he lived, but his work was
about to explode into global academic prominence.
Okay, we absolutely must dedicate time to addressing
Faulkner's position on racial issues, which are
central both to the history of the South he described
and to the critical reception of his work. His
personal views were difficult, often contradictory,
and really rooted in the complexities of his
time and place. They were. Publicly, he advocated
for the ultimate abolition of racial segregation,
which was progressive for a white Southern figure
in the mid -century. However, he was highly critical
of forced or fast -moving desegregation efforts.
He argued that civil rights activists should
go slow and adopt more moderate positions to
avoid a violent backlash. He often felt the South
needed to solve his own problems internally and
gradually. That gradualist position, however,
brought him into fierce conflict with leading
civil rights thinkers and writers. Indeed, the
essayist and novelist James Baldwin was one of
his most articulate critics. Baldwin strongly
felt that Faulkner, like many educated white
Southerners, was dangerously naive in believing
a genuine middle ground could exist between uncompromising
segregationists and passionate integrationists.
Baldwin viewed that moderate stance as intellectually
and morally untenable. arguing that any delay
in justice was itself a form of complicity with
oppression. And it's so critical to contrast
his personal views, which were undeniably prejudiced,
with the depth and compassion he showed in his
writing about black characters. The contract
is powerful, and it speaks to the ability of
great art to transcend the limitations of the
artist. The sources note that Faulkner sometimes
expressed deeply seated racial prejudices. He's
quoted, for instance, as having once said that
television is for niggers. These personal comments
reflect the toxic environment of prejudice prevalent
in the Deep South, even among its intellectual
elite. However, many African -American peers
found his work uniquely capable of capturing
the complexities of their experience. And that's
the key synthesis point. Ralph Ellison, the author
of Invisible Man, provided some of the most powerful
counter praise. Ellison called Faulkner the greatest
artist the South has produced. And more significantly,
he praised Faulkner for doing. So much to explore
the types of Negro personality in American fiction.
So Ellison argued that while Faulkner, the man,
might have been flawed, Faulkner, the artist,
was able to penetrate the surface and convey
the humanity, dignity and internal complexity
of black characters like Dilsey in The Sound
of the Fury. in a way that few of his white contemporaries
could match. And Faulkner's literary impact extended
far beyond the American South. In fact, he was
a massive cultural phenomenon in Europe long
before the U .S. fully appreciated him. His popularity
in France is legendary. During the Nazi occupation
of WWII, the German occupiers systematically
banned American literature. So reading writers
like Hemingway and Faulkner became an active,
quiet, political act of defiance. He achieved
almost mythic status. The intellectual elite
of France France treated him as a god, literally.
Jean -Paul Sartre, the great existentialist philosopher,
called Faulkner a god. And his influence wasn't
merely academic. Albert Camus, another towering
literary figure, adapted Faulkner's novel Requiem
for a Nun for the stage. He remains intensely
popular in France, which really helped solidify
his reputation globally. And that technique of
building a dense, contained world also became
foundational for the massive literary explosion
that emerged from Latin America, the so -called
boom. Faulkner's Yucna Patafa was transformative
for Latin American fiction. Writers struggling
to capture their own vast, complicated, and often
violent national histories found the conceptual
tool they needed in Faulkner's model. The idea
of the intensely observed, geographically limited,
yet universally resonant world was adopted widely.
We see that specifically in the fictional towns
created by Latin American masters. Precisely.
The famous Macondo, created by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and Juan Carlos Onetti Sanchez, Santa
Maria, are structurally and conceptually very
much in the vein of Faulkner's fictional county.
They realized that by focusing intensely on a
small, closed world, they could project the complexity
of an entire continent. And the Nobel laureate
Mario Vargas Llosa offered powerful testimony
about Faulkner's specific impact on his own education.
He claimed that during his student years, he
learned more about the craft of fiction from
studying Yoknapatawpha than he did from any of
his formal university classes. Faulkner provided
the technical scaffolding for modern, complex
narrative structure. Back home, his influence
is felt everywhere in Southern and American literature.
We have the famous quote from Flannery O 'Connor.
O 'Connor's quote perfectly encapsulates the
sheer gravitational weight of Faulkner's achievement.
She famously stated that The presence alone of
Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference
in what the writer can and cannot permit himself
to do. And she characterized the difference by
saying that trying to write Southern literature
without acknowledging him was like a writer's
mule and wagon stalled on the same track that
Dixie Limited is roaring down. You simply couldn't
ignore the massive force he represented. And
that line of discipleship continues right up
through contemporary American letters. Cormac
McCarthy, known for his raw, maximalist, and
often biblical prose, is consistently described
as a spiritual disciple of Faulkner. The dense,
complex syntax, the repetition for dramatic effect,
the relentless focus on inherited violence, it's
all there. It all builds directly on Faulkner's
foundation. Finally, for anyone who wants a physical
connection to this great writer, his home, Roanoke,
is maintained by the University of Mississippi.
and it contains an incredible artifact of his
intense working process. Roanoke is maintained
precisely as he left it. And in his small study,
the plot outline for a fable is still preserved,
scribbled in great detail directly onto the white
plaster wall. That's amazing. It is. This fascinating
artifact demonstrates the meticulous planning,
the day -by -day structural engineering that
lay beneath the surface of his supposedly chaotic
stream -of -consciousness prose. The dense, fragmented
novels required rigorous, almost architectural
planning. And that wall is the ultimate testament
to his craft. So we've concluded our deep dive
into the life of William Faulkner, a man defined
by paradox. The self -educated literary genius
who told tall tales about flying, the reluctant
Hollywood scribe who wrote profound philosophical
literature, and a high modernist who dedicated
his entire output to a single mythical southern
county. He built Yoknapatawpha County into a
universal mental landscape, capturing the agony
and sweat of the human spirit, all while intensely
disliking the fame and recognition that followed.
His struggle to balance commercial necessity,
those years spent enduring the cultural Babylon
of Hollywood for a paycheck with his uncompromising
artistic integrity, is really the central sacrifice
of his monumental achievement. It highlights
that to truly create something which did not
exist before, as he defined it, required an almost
defiant removal from the world's demands and
a relentless focus on the internal reality of
his own making. And we are left with that final
provocative thought looping back to his ultimate
declaration of independence, his resignation
letter from the post office, where he refused
to be at the beck and call of every itinerant
scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage
stamp. What does this single act of defiance
tell you about the writer who chose to create
his own world rather than serve the daily demands
of reality? Is true artistic freedom ultimately
about rejecting the necessity of small demands
to focus entirely on monumental creation? It's
a profound thought to mull over the next time
you pick up one of his essential demanding novels.