Faulkner, William - Introduction
William Faulkner
Chronology
1897: William Cuthbert Falkner (he added the u to his last name in 1918) is born on 25 September to Murry Cuthbert and Maud Butler Falkner in New Albany, Mississippi, where his father is a freight agent for the family-owned Gulf and Chicago Railroad, a sixty-two-mile-long narrow-gauge line.
1898: Murry Falkner’s promotion to passenger agent and treasurer of the family railroad prompts a move to the company’s operations center in Ripley, Mississippi, where he and his father before him were born. The family lives in Ripley until 1902.
1899: Faulkner’s first brother, Murry Charles “Jack” Falkner, is born.
1901: Faulkner’s second brother, John Wesley Thompson Falkner III, called Johncy as a child, is born.
1902: When Faulkner’s grandfather, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, decides to sell the railroad, Murry Falkner moves his wife and three sons to Oxford, Mississippi, where they live briefly in “The Big Place,” the grandfather’s house.
1904: Murry Falkner’s sister, Holland Falkner Wilkins, is widowed. She returns home with her daughter, Sallie Murry Wilkins, who is two years younger than William, to live with the family in “The Big Place.”
1905: Faulkner enters the first grade in Oxford public school.
1906: Faulkner skips second grade and enters third. Near Christmas, his paternal grandmother, Sallie Murry Falkner, dies at home in “The Big Place.”
1907: On 1 June Faulkner’s maternal grandmother, called Damuddy dies after a lingering illness in their home. Faulkner’s youngest brother is born on 15 August and named Dean Swift Falkner for the recently deceased Damuddy, Leila Dean Swift Butler.
1914: World War I begins in the summer, at about the same time that Faulkner establishes a friendship with Phil Stone, four years older and a recent Yale graduate. Stone begins to direct Faulkner’s reading and his first attempts at writing poetry. Faulkner enters eleventh grade, the last required year of secondary schooling.
1915: Though Faulkner returns to Oxford High School for the optional twelfth year, he does not complete it, dropping out of school for good.
1916: Faulkner works briefly as clerk in his paternal grandfather’s bank, the First National Bank of Oxford, reads widely, and develops a fascination with the exploits of European aviators in the war.
1918: Faulkner’s childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, is engaged to a dashing University of Mississippi law graduate, Cornell Franklin. As the marriage date approaches, Faulkner is increasingly distraught. Weeks before the April wedding Phil Stone invites him to New Haven, Connecticut, where Stone has returned to study law at Yale. With Stone’s help, Faulkner devises a plan to join the Canadian unit of the British Royal Air Force, adding a u to his surname to make it look more British. In July, William “Faulkner” begins training at a Toronto ground school.
Faulkner misses the chance to engage in air combat over Europe when the November Armistice ends World War I. No evidence exists that he flew during his training or, as he later claimed, crashed an airplane. Home in Oxford by Christmas, he nevertheless wears a Royal Air Force officer’s uniform, the wings of a pilot, and the service cap of an overseas veteran. “Lapres-midi d’un faune,” a poem titled after a work by the leader of the French symbolist poets, Stephane Mallarme, becomes Faulkner’s first publication in a nationally distributed periodical,The New Republic.
1919-1920: Faulkner takes classes at the University of Mississippi, “Ole Miss,” where his father now works in the business office. As a member of the student dramatic club, Faulkner participates in productions and writes a play bearing the club’s name, Marionettes. He hand-letters and illustrates six copies of the play as gifts for friends.
1921: Faulkner makes an exploratory fall trip to the art scene in New York City. Except for part-time clerking in a bookstore, his trip is without result. By Christmas he returns to his family in Oxford and reluctantly agrees to accept a job arranged for him by family and friends as “fourth-class postmaster” of the University of Mississippi campus post office.
1922: Faulkner’s paternal grandfather dies in Oxford, and Faulkner begins his tenure as campus postmaster. On the job he reads magazines that arrive for his post office patrons and writes essays and poems for student publications. He places a poem in one of the new literary magazines appearing in the South, the New Orleans Double Dealer.
1923: Still postmaster, Faulkner seeks unsuccessfully to place a book-length manuscript, “Orpheus and Other Poems,” with the Four Seas Company of Boston.
1924: Faulkner prepares a different volume of poems to submit to Four Seas. Stone agrees to pay publishing expenses of $400, and The Marble Faun is published in December, just as Faulkner contrives to end his thirty-six-month association with the U.S. Postal Service.
1925: Faulkner travels to New Orleans. His goal is to book a freighter to Europe, hoping the expatriate experience will boost his career as it has those of writers such as Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost. The New Orleans French Quarter is so congenial that he remains there six months, becoming friends with the writer Sherwood Anderson and launching his own career in fiction. Faulkner’s first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, receives Anderson’s blessing and is accepted by Anderson’s New York publisher, Boni and Liveright. Faulkner and his New Orleans roommate, the artist William Spratling, sail for Genoa in July, and Faulkner makes his way to Paris, his base for three months. He writes portions of two novels and several sketches, but he runs out of money and returns to Oxford, Mississippi, by Christmas.
1926: Early in the new year Faulkner returns to New Orleans to await the publication of his first novel.Soldiers’ Pay is published in February and receives good national reviews but is not a runaway success. Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood sweetheart, returns to Oxford from China with her two children and files for divorce from Cornell Franklin. Though now courting another girl, Faulkner dedicates to Estelle a gift typescript of New Orleans sketches called “Royal Street.” He and Spratling publish Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles, a satire of Anderson and other members of the New Orleans art scene, including themselves. In early September, Faulkner finishes his second novel, Mosquitoes, a roman a clef about his French Quarter friends, and Boni and Liveright agrees to publish it. He starts “Father Abraham,” a fictional work about the rise of a sharecropper named Flem Snopes. At the same time he begins a novel concerning a family closely resembling his own with the working title “Flags in the Dust.”
1927: On 30 April Mosquitoes is published. Faulkner’s New Orleans friends, including Anderson, are angered by the way they are portrayed in the book. Faulkner returns to his parents’ house on the Ole Miss campus to complete “Flags in the Dust.” His publisher, Horace Liveright, judges the novel unfocused and turns it down. Faulkner proposes other projects—the Snopes chronicle he has started in “Father Abraham” and a book of short stories about his townspeople—but his association with Boni and Liveright is over, and the projected book of stories never appears.
1928: Faulkner puts aside the Snopes book and fails to place the rejected “Flags in the Dust” with other publishers. In March he embarks on a novel-length project about three boys named Compson and their sister, Caddie, believing no one will ever publish the book. In September an Ole Miss friend, Ben Wasson, now a literary agent, places “Flags in the Dust” with Harcourt, Brace. The acceptance requires Faulkner to cut one-third of the text, but he assigns the pruning to Wasson and continues to work on the Compson novel, now called “The Sound and the Fury.” “Flags in the Dust” is retitled “Sartoris,” the name of the central fictional family in the story.
1929: In January, Harcourt, Brace publishes Sartoris in an edition of fewer than two thousand copies. Though Sherwood Anderson has withdrawn his friendship, the book is admiringly dedicated to him. As Faulkner expects, Harcourt, Brace turns down “The Sound and the Fury.” He signs with a new firm that Harrison Smith, a young editor leaving Harcourt, has set up with the British publisher Jonathan Cape. As “The Sound and the Fury” is being readied for publication, Faulkner composes a lurid story of rural bootleggers, Memphis gangsters, abduction, rape, and murder, hoping to make some money from his writing. The title is “Sanctuary.”
In late April, Estelle Oldham’s divorce from Cornell Franklin is final. She lives in Oxford with her parents and two children, and Faulkner sees her frequently. In June, he writes Harrison Smith asking for $500 so that he can marry Estelle, and on 20 June he and his childhood sweetheart drive to a small community southwest of Oxford, where the ceremony is performed. They take an apartment near the Ole Miss campus. Faulkner begins a job, arranged by his father, as night foreman in the university power plant. The Sound and the Fury appears on 7 October. Though printing less than two thousand copies, Cape and Smith also publish a promotional pamphlet in which popular author Evelyn Scott praises the novel.
Writing at night in a small office inside the power plant, Faulkner works on a new novel, “As I Lay Dying,” between 25 October—the day following the Black Tuesday crash of the American stock market—and 11 December.
1930: When Faulkner completes “As I Lay Dying,” he immediately turns to systematic marketing of his short stories. In April “A Rose for Emily” is published in Forum, earning Faulkner $50 for his first story in a nationally distributed magazine. In May another national journal, Scribner’s Magazine, agrees to publish “Dry September,” the somber story of a lynching, for $200. In June, Faulkner moves his new family into a run-down pre-Civil War dwelling on wooded land near the outskirts of Oxford. It lacks electricity and indoor plumbing. He names it “Rowan Oak,” after a Scottish legend about a tree with magical powers against evil spirits. Estelle is pregnant with their first child.
That summer and fall, The Saturday Evening Post takes two of Faulkner’s stories, H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury publishes one, and Cape and Smith publish As I Lay Dying. After a long delay Faulkner receives galley proofs of his sensational gangster novel Sanctuary and revises the proofs heavily, paying to have type reset.
1931: On 11 January a daughter, named for Faulkner’s great-aunt Alabama, is born prematurely and lives only a few days. The revised Sanctuary is published by Cape and Smith in February and is more widely reviewed than any of Faulkner’s previous books. In mid August he begins a novel, initially titled “Dark House,” about Joe Christmas, a man who does not know whether he is white or black. In September, Faulkner’s first short-story collection, These 13, originally to be called “A Rose for Emily and Other Stories,” is published by Cape and Smith.
1932: The inexpensive Modern Library edition of Sanctuary is published, with an introduction by Faulkner in which he portrays him-self as a member of the “hard-bellied” tough-guy school of writers. He claims to have revised Sanctuary so it would not “shame” The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. When Cape and Smith enters bankruptcy, Faulkner’s $4,000 share of royalties is frozen.
Between May and June, under a contract signed earlier, Faulkner undertakes his first work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, working six weeks at $500 per week for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In June, Para-mount Pictures takes an option on Sanctuary for a motion picture; a month later M-G-M buys movie rights to Faulkner’s Saturday Evening Post war story, “Turn About.” He meets movie director Howard Hawks, who will remain a supporter for more than two decades.
Faulkner’s father dies in Oxford at age sixty-one. Harrison Smith, who has emerged from the bankruptcy of his partnership with Jonathan Cape, joins with editor Robert Haas to establish Smith and Haas. The new firm publishes the novel originally to be called “Dark House” as Light in August. Paramount Pictures purchases movie rights to Sanctuary. From late November, Faulkner is again under contract as a screenwriter for M-G-M, this time at $600 a week. Because Estelle is expecting another child, he contrives to work at home in Oxford, traveling to locations if necessary.
1933: Faulkner’s absentee screenwriting job continues though May. A Green Bough, a volume of imitative early poems that prove, in the words of one reviewer, only that Faulkner “reads a lot,” is published by Smith and Haas. On publication day Faulkner solos in an airplane on his way to earning his first pilot’s license. With money from movie purchases, he buys from his Memphis flight instructor a four-passenger single-engine Waco aircraft.
Estelle and Faulkner’s daughter, Jill, is born on 24 June. That winter he receives his pilot’s license and begins work on a novel titled “Requiem for a Nun.”
1934: Faulkner puts both “Requiem for a Nun” and a novel about the Snopeses aside in favor of one titled “DARK HOUSE or something of that nature”—the title he had first considered for Light in August. His summary of the story identifies it as the germ of Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
With his flight instructor, Vernon Omlie of Memphis, Faulkner flies to New Orleans to observe an air show held to mark the opening of the city’s new airport. By late fall he writes his agent that he is com-posing a novel about events at the air show, and that spring, Doctor Martino and Other Stones, Faulkner’s second story collection, is published under the Smith and Haas imprint.
In September The Saturday Evening Post begins publishing Faulkner’s Civil War stories that eventually constitute The Unvanquished (1938).
1935: Early in the year Faulkner receives a $2,000 advance for Absalom, Absalom! from Smith and Haas and completes his novel about the New Orleans air show, which is published in March as Pylon. That fall his youngest brother, Dean, marries, and Faulkner gives him the Waco airplane as a wedding present. Within three months, Dean crashes the plane and is killed. Faulkner takes responsibility for Dean’s widow, who is pregnant, and spends evenings caring for her and his mother. Under these conditions he continues to write the second half of Absalom, Absalom! From Hollywood. Howard Hawks responds to Faulkner’s financial crisis by arranging another contract at 20th Century-Fox for $1,000 a week.
1936: In January, apparently for the first time, Faulkner enters a special medical facility at Byhalia, Mississippi, to recover from a period of heavy drinking. Alcohol abuse runs in his family, and he has had a reputation for heavy drinking since he was a young man. Soon in Hollywood again, Faulkner works on a World War I novel, Roland Dorgelès’s Les Croix de bois (1921; translated as Wooden Crosses, 1921), which becomes the 1936 movie The Road to Glory and influences his own novel A Fable (1954). He meets Hawks’s script supervisor, a beautiful Southerner named Meta Carpenter, with whom he falls in love and has an intense affair. After going home to Oxford, Faulkner returns to Hollywood with Estelle and Jill, despite his continuing affair with Carpenter.
Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind is published in June. Faulkner tries to sell movie rights for Absalom, Absalom! to a studio for $50,000, the price David O. Selznick paid for the rights to Gone With the Wind. No one buys it.
Random House purchases Smith and Haas, bringing Harrison Smith and Robert Haas on board as editors and Faulkner along with them as an author. Random House gives Absalom, Absalom! a strong sendoff, printing a six-thousand-copy first edition and a limited, signed edition. The initial printing features a foldout map of Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson, the fictional northern Mississippi county and county seat that form the setting for most of Faulkner’s fiction.
Throughout the winter Faulkner works on forgettable movie properties and is given no screen credit, but his salary rises to $1,000 a week, more than the median annual salary of rural Southern whites. In April, unwilling to wait any longer for Faulkner to divorce Estelle, Meta Carpenter marries a young concert pianist named Wolfgang Rebner and departs for Germany. Faulkner sends Estelle and Jill back home to Mississippi. In June, Princeton University professor Maurice Coindreau spends a week with Faulkner discussing the translation of The Sound and the Fury into French, one of several projects that will enhance the novelist’s European reputation.
1938: The Unvanquished, a Civil War fiction fashioned from stories Faulkner published in The Saturday Evening Post, appears at the height of the national success of Gone With the Wind. M-G-M, a loser in the bidding war for Mitchell’s novel, buys the rights to The Unvanquished for $25,000. In November, Harold Ober, who also represents F. Scott Fitzgerald, becomes Faulkner’s literary agent. The following month Faulkner lays out plans for a trilogy of novels on the Snopes family: “The Peasants” (from Honoré de Balzac’s novel Les Paysans, 1845), “Rus in Urbe” (The Rustic in the City), and “Ilium Falling” (from Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus, 1604).
1939: Faulkner is elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, along with John Steinbeck, whose novel The Grapes of Wrath is published in April, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, whose The Yearling won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938. Random House retitles Faulkner’s latest novel, which he originally called “If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem.” It becomes The Wild Palms, and when it is published, Faulkner is featured on the cover of Time magazine. Despite the sales of movie rights and short stories, as well as two consecutive successful books, Faulkner’s financial obligations keep his bank account low, and he seeks employment in Hollywood again.
1940: In January, Caroline Barr, the servant who helped supervise Faulkner’s upbringing, dies at Rowan Oak, near the age of one hundred. Fulfilling the wishes of his old nurse, Faulkner has her funeral service held in the parlor of his house and delivers the eulogy him-self. The Hamlet, the first of the three novels about Flem Snopes and his kin, is published on 1 April. A review in the Brooklyn Citizen notes positively that Faulkner “has gone back to the old writing ground, Yoknapatawpha County, to come to grips with the common man…. Here a southerner has ceased to blame the negro for the ills of the South (either blame or fear).”
1941: Faulkner explores another screenwriting job in Hollywood and sends Ober a short story titled “The Bear,” a simplified hunting tale intended for The Saturday Evening Post. Shortly after he mails the final chapters of Go Down, Moses to his publisher, Japanese aircraft bomb Pearl Harbor and America enters World War II, which has been in progress since September 1939.
1942: Concerned about the war, Faulkner seeks a role training air recruits. By the end of the summer he has accepted a mediocre screenwriting contract with Warner Bros., and he goes to Hollywood again.
1943: The war and negative feelings about Hollywood dominate Faulkner’s thoughts. To his stepson Malcolm he writes a letter condemning racial prejudice in America.
1944: Faulkner starts a novel that he calls a “fable.” He explains to a Random House editor the “argument” of the fable: In the middle of World War I, “Christ (some movement in mankind which wished to stop war forever) reappeared and was crucified again. We are … in the midst of war again. Suppose Christ gives us one more chance, and we crucify him again, perhaps for the last time.” Faulkner admits that the summary is “crudely put” and that he does not intend to preach. In the spring he is again in Hollywood, where Hawks asks him to serve as a “script doctor” for the movie adaptation of Hemingway’s 1937 novel To Have and to Have Not.
1945: Faulkner responds with increasing enthusiasm to literary historian Malcolm Cowley’s proposal for a “Portable Faulkner” volume from Viking Press that would showcase the writer’s stories and novels about Yoknapatawpha County.
1946: Random House negotiates with Warner Bros, to let Faulkner finish his fable and to agree not to claim rights to the story. His publisher provides a monthly allowance so he can stay home and write, and in the spring The Portable Faulkner is published, Faulkner’s first book in four years. It falls into the hands of veterans returning from the war and a new generation of college students.
1947: With support from Random House, Faulkner works on “A Fable.”
1948: At the beginning of the year, Faulkner puts aside the fable and begins a murder mystery. The plot is one he summarized a decade before, the drama of an independent African American man who is falsely accused of murdering a white man but solves the crime and exonerates himself. Prior to publication of the mystery, Intruder in the Dust, Random House arranges the sale of movie rights for $50,000, the price Selznick paid for Gone With the Wind. Despite the windfall from sale of the movie rights, Faulkner has another bout of drinking that lands him in a medical facility. He is elected to the inner circle of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, on 23 November.
1949: Clarence Brown, who had directed the movie version of Rawlings’s The Yearling, films Intruder in the Dust in Oxford, Mississippi, giving the town a new appreciation of Faulkner that is compounded when the world premiere is held there. A collection of short mystery stories, Knight’s Gambit, is published in November.
1950: Faulkner writes letters to the Memphis Commercial Appeal condemning racial injustice in Mississippi. In June the American Academy of Arts and Letters votes him their highest award for fiction, the Howells Medal. Collected Stories of William Faulkner is published in August. On 10 November the Swedish Academy announces that Faulkner has received the unanimous vote for the Nobel Prize in literature. He graciously accepts the honor but declines the trip to Stockholm to receive the award. Random House and his family persuade him to go, and he takes his daughter, Jill, with him.
1951: Faulkner begins to finish projects left pending during the financially tense days when he had to seek every means to earn money. Requiem for a Nun is published and, as Faulkner’s first post-Nobel Prize novel, is reviewed widely.
1952: In November, Faulkner assists with a program about his life for the television show Omnibus.
1953: With Jill at college, Faulkner spends more time away from home. Though his financial worries are over, his drinking and his domestic problems increase together. A romantic interest in a young writer named Joan Williams ends this year when she marries.
1954: Faulkner meets another young woman, Jean Stein, whom he sees frequently. He spends time in Europe, where he makes final corrections on “A Fable.” Jill writes her father that she wishes to marry and wants him to come home, but he does not do so immediately. In Paris he once again requires medical attention because of his drinking. The Faulkner Reader, a new anthology, becomes a selection of the Book of the Month Club, and A Fable is published.
1955: A Fable receives the National Book Award for fiction. Faulkner travels to Japan for a series of seminars sponsored by the U.S. Department of State. Big Woods, an illustrated collection of hunting stories, is published.
1956: Faulkner’s effort to complete the second and third volumes of the Snopes trilogy runs, in his own words, hot and cold. The African American writer and editor W. E. B. Du Bois offers to debate him on the topic of integration. Faulkner declines, wiring in reply that there is not a debatable point between them, since both agree already that Du Bois’s position regarding equal rights is morally and legally the right one. In September the French writer Albert Camus’s stage adaptation of Requiem for a Nun premieres in Paris, increasing Faulkner’s French and European reputation.
1957: At the beginning of the year Faulkner and his wife settle into a house in Charlottesville, Virginia, where Jill and her family now live. He accepts a position as writer in residence at the University of Virginia. The Town, the second volume of the Snopes trilogy, is published.
1958: Faulkner writes a friend that he is tired, nearing the end of his creative powers, and primarily involved in training horses. In July, Saxe Commins, Faulkner’s editor at Random House for more than twenty years, dies at age sixty-six of a heart attack.
1959: The Mansion, the final volume in the Snopes trilogy, is published. Faulkner negotiates with Random House for money to buy a show-place horse farm in Charlottesville. In mid March he falls with his horse while riding, breaking his collarbone and sustaining otherminor injuries. The break heals slowly, and Faulkner drinks to relieve the pain, worsening his condition. Another fall in May, this time while riding a horse on a paved road, puts him temporarily on crutches. In mid summer his longtime literary agent, Harold Ober, dies.
1960: Faulkner writes obituary remarks for Camus, who has been killed in an automobile accident. His mother, Maud Butler Falkner, dies in Oxford at age eighty-eight.
1961: Faulkner brags about rapid progress on a new novel portraying a youth’s adventures with a horse.
1962: Early in the year Faulkner again falls from a horse and is injured, and again he drinks to relieve the pain. His new novel, The Reivers, is published and is a Book of the Month Club selection. In the summer Faulkner makes his usual visit to Oxford, Mississippi. On 6 July, following a seizure similar to those brought on earlier in his life by heavy drinking, he dies of cardiac arrest at a sanatorium in Byhalia, not far from Oxford.
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