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Barn Burning | Author Biography

William Faulkner—store-clerk, carpenter, general construction-worker, coal shoveler, deck-hand, cadet-aviator, and ultimately a prime incarnation of the Great American Novelist—was a product of the Deep South. Born in New Albany, Mississippi, the son of a railroad worker, he joined Britain's Royal Air Force in 1918 attended the University of Mississippi, Oxford, and then seemed to lurch through life, changing jobs and travelling. With the appearance of Soldiers' Pay (1926), a novel published with the assistance of his friend Sherwood Anderson he launched himself on the career for which he would become famous.

William Faulkner
William Faulkner

Many a paradox clings to Faulkner, a traditionalist and even a reactionary who struck out into the realms of extreme literary innovation. Focusing on simple, or sometimes even simple-minded, characters, he employed complex syntax, interior monologue, disrupted chronology, and multiple perspectives to create what might be called realistic allegories. Often, at the core of the most complicated narrative, one finds a Biblical or folkloric motif; and, despite his frequent defense of peculiarly Southern values, Faulkner was often a penetrating critic of America's perennial race conflict. Then again, this extraordinary artist turned out to be an ordinary man, afflicted by his own peccadillos (a taste for strong drink, for example); and at moments, though in complete control of his formidable literary powers, he allowed himself to be drawn into situations that compromised his gifts, as when he worked briefly as a studio writer in Hollywood.

Soldiers' Pay was followed, in rather rapid succession, by Mosquitoes (1927), Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1929), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a sequence which established Faulkner's reputation as a major presence in American letters and a leading figure in experimental prose. Considering the density of these novels, the achievement which they represent can only be considered as one of the most remarkable in the twentieth century. Unlike James Joyce who labored for forty years over two immense and experimental novels, Faulkner turned out one book after another, as if possessed. Much of Faulkner's work is unified through being integrated into the fictional—or rather mythical—Yoknapatawpha County in northern Mississippi, the imaginary setting of his best-known stories and novels, including ‘‘Barn-Burning’’ and ‘‘The Bear.’’ Like Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Yoknapatawpha County represents an immense act of creative imagination. Faulkner's synthesis of place, history, character, and atmosphere easily leads the reader into believing that Yoknapatawpha is a real place. Of course, real elements go into its making, drawn from the actual South that Faulkner knew so well.

Because the novels that he wanted to write—the difficult ones—sold poorly, Faulkner sometimes produced potboilers (works deliberately and entirely designed to make money for the author), of which Sanctuary, a story of abduction, rape, and murder, is a good example. It was probably on the strength of Sanctuary that Faulkner found himself summoned to Hollywood. His best-known screen-writing effort is his film adaptation of the 1939 Raymond Chandler novel The Big Sleep (1939). After a short while, Faulkner returned to novel-writing, which he practiced until his death in 1962. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 as well as two Pulitzer Prizes for his novels A Fable (in 1955) and The Reivers (posthumously, in 1963). Faulkner's later work (including, ironically, A Fable) sometimes seems to be a parody of the earlier writing, but there are enough exceptions to the trend to justify the claim that Faulkner was a great artist from the beginning of his career until the end.