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The Bear | Author Biography

Born on September 25, 1897 William Faulkner belonged to a once-wealthy family of former plantation owners. Raised among a circle of acquaintances similar to General Compson and Major deSpain, Faulkner knew first-hand about life in the South after the Civil War. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County, and its county seat, Jefferson, represent the actual Lafayette County and the city of Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived most of his life. Although Faulkner dropped out of high school and never finished college, he was a passionate fan of poetry and originally planned to become a poet. He worked for a brief period as a bank clerk before being accepted into the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War I although he never saw combat action.

William Faulkner
William Faulkner

After working in a New York bookstore and as the university postmaster at the University of Mississippi, Faulkner began publishing stories and poems. His novel The Sound and the Fury brought him to the attention of several critics. Once he realized his talent for fiction writing, Faulkner became a prolific writer, publishing almost twenty novels and several short stories in addition to two volumes of poetry. He also wrote screenplays, essays, and newspaper articles. In his later years, Faulkner traveled widely, giving lectures at American colleges as well as in other countries. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction and a National Book Award. He died on July 6, 1962.

Much of Faulkner's work concerns the decline of Southern life in the aftermath of the Civil War. Once perceived to be a gracious, genteel society, the South as portrayed by Faulkner consists largely of impoverished descendants of former plantation families eking out a living alongside sharecroppers of African-American descent as well as those farmers who had never been affluent. Although these rural areas may seem isolated from world events such as wars and economic depression, Faulkner's works often mirror outside struggle within his fictional county. "The Bear," for example, creates a sense of disillusionment and grief at the decline of natural man in the face of man-made "progress." The story examines how modern society, with its advanced warfare techniques and increasingly mechanized workforce, threatens to destroy man and nature for good.

Another issue of great concern for Faulkner was the ongoing racism that continued to plague the South. Faulkner hated slavery and the social problems that remained in spite of emancipation, and his works often reflect his ongoing concern. Ike McCaslin shares Faulkner's horror at the idea of slavery. He rejects his inheritance in an attempt to escape his connection to this history.

As a writer of the early part of the twentieth century, Faulkner became an influential figure during the modernist period, a movement characterized by experimental forms of fiction such as interior monologue, multiple narrators, and shifts in narrative time. Each of these characteristics can be found in "The Bear," particularly in section four, which Faulkner labored over for several years after completing the first portion of the hunting story.