1950's The Arts | Faulkner, William 1897-1962

WRITER

Awards.

A self-described Mississippi farmer was hailed as one of the world's greatest writers in 1950. In June the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded William Faulkner the Howells Medal, their highest honor to a senior writer, and in November Faulkner was named winner of the 1949 Nobel Prize for literature, which the Swedish Academy had withheld the previous year. In America the choice was roundly criticized. Faulkner was variously described in the popular press as depraved, obscure, insignificant, and irrelevant. As recently as 1945 none of Faulkner's seventeen books had been in print, and his two new novels of the early 1950s, A Requiem for a Nun (1951) and A Fable (1954), did little in the minds of most readers to justify the American Academy's and the Swedish Academy's judgments.

A Requiem for a Nun.

It was unclear to most readers whether A Requiem for a Nun was...