That Evening Sun | Author Biography

William Cuthbert Faulkner (family name originally Falkner) was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25,1897. He was the oldest of four sons. His family was middle-class and descended from a man who became the model for one of Faulkner's own characters: his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, who commanded a Mississippi unit in the Civil War. Upon returning from the war, Colonel Falkner founded a railroad that his son later took over. His family's colorful history and its intersections with the history of the South provided Faulkner with models for such families as the Compsons.

William Faulkner
William Faulkner

Faulkner's family moved to Oxford when he was very young, and in Oxford Faulkner developed a love for the outdoors that comes out in much of his fiction. During World War I Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Air Force but never saw combat. Upon his return he began to write in earnest. For much of the 1920s, Faulkner wandered, moving from the University of Mississippi to New York to New Orleans to Europe and back to New Orleans. Faulkner published his first book, The Marble Faun, a collection of poems, in 1924. The book was named after one of Nathaniel Hawthorne's books and, like Hawthorne, with its publication, Faulkner added a letter to his last name.

In 1926, Faulkner published his first novel, Soldiers' Pay. Although the novel could hardly be called a success either artistically or financially, Faulkner's course was set. In 1929 he published Sartoris, his first novel set, like ‘‘That Evening Sun,’’ in Yoknapatawpha. Others soon followed, including his masterpieces The Sound and the Fury,As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!. Faulkner gained a great deal of critical recognition because of these works but never saw the financial success he craved. To that end he wrote two books, Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun, whose sensational subject matter was intended to make them best-sellers and, he hoped, would tempt Hollywood to make movies from them. He also signed on with a Hollywood studio to write screenplays in the 1930s. Two of the famous movies to which he contributed are the film version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and the film version of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, both starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Faulkner attempted to get a military commission during the Second World War but was unsuccessful. During the 1940s, Faulkner rededicated himself to the craft of fiction and produced two other masterpieces, Go Down, Moses and The Hamlet. Also in this decade, critical opinion of Faulkner changed drastically. The prominent critic Malcolm Cowley edited and, in 1946, published The Portable Faulkner, an anthology that drew from works throughout Faulkner's career. With the publication of this book, Faulkner quickly became regarded as America's greatest living writer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. In the years following the Nobel Prize, Faulkner continued to write and, in 1957, moved to Charlottesville to become the Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia. After completing his final work, the Huckleberry Finn-inspired The Reivers, Faulkner died of a heart attack in 1962.