Faulkner, William (1897 - 1962) | Introduction
Introduction
(Born William Cuthbert Falkner; changed surname to Faulkner) American novelist, short story writer, poet, screenwriter, and essayist.
A preeminent figure in twentieth-century American literature, Faulkner created a profound and complex body of work that examines exploitation and corruption in the American South. Many of Faulkner's novels and short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional area reflecting the geographical and cultural background of his native Mississippi. Faulkner's works frequently reflect the tumultuous history of the South while developing perceptive explorations of human character. His use of bizarre, grotesque, and violent imagery, melodrama, and sensationalism to depict the corruption and decay of the region make him one of the earliest practitioners of the subgenre known as Southern Gothic literature. Faulkner's works that are especially well known for their Gothic qualities include the novels Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936); the novella As I Lay Dying (1930); and the short story "A Rose for Emily" (1930). They combine burlesque and dark humor with realism and elements of the horrific and macabre to caricature a society that is unable to break from its past and look to the future. Faulkner employs gothicism, then, as a searing
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, into a genteel Southern family. When Faulkner was five, the family moved to the town of Oxford. He showed considerable artistic talent as a boy, drawing and writing poetry, but was an indifferent student. He dropped out of high school in 1915 to work as a clerk in his grandfather's bank, began writing poetry, and submitted drawings to the University of Mississippi's yearbook. During World War I, Faulkner tried to enlist in the U.S. army, but was rejected because of his small stature. Instead, he manipulated his acceptance into the Royal Canadian Air Force by affecting a British accent and forging letters of recommendation. The war ended before Faulkner experienced combat duty, however, and he returned to his hometown, where he intermittently attended the University of Mississippi as a special student. In August, 1919, his first poem, "L'Apres-midi d'un faune," was published in New Republic, and later that year the Mississippian published one of his short stories, "Landing in Luck." After a brief period of employment as a bookstore clerk in New York, Faulkner returned to Oxford, where he was hired as a university postmaster. He resigned, however, when the postal inspector noticed that Faulkner often brought his writing to the post office and became so immersed in what he was doing that he ignored patrons.
In 1924, with the help of his friend Phil Stone, Faulkner published The Marble Faun, a volume of poetry. The following year he moved to New Orleans, where he associated with other writers, including Sherwood Anderson, and wrote his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), which was accepted for publication. He traveled in Europe for a few months and then returned to New Orleans and continued to write. His first notable success came in 1929 with Sartoris. Later that year, a few months after he married his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham, Faulkner published what is regarded as his greatest work, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The following year his novella As I Lay Dying and "A Rose for Emily" were published, and in 1931 Sanctuary, which had been rejected by publishers two years earlier, appeared and became a best-seller. Light in August followed in 1932, the same year Faulkner began his career in Hollywood as a screenwriter. He traveled between Mississippi and Hollywood for several years, writing scripts when he was not working on his novels and short stories. Among his film credits were To Have and Have Not (1945), based on Ernest Hemingway's novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's detective thriller. Works that appeared during these years include Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942).
By the mid-1940s, most Americans had largely ceased to read Faulkner's works, although they were popular in Europe. This changed in 1946 with the publication The Portable Faulkner, which renewed critical and popular interest in Faulkner's works in his native country. His election in 1948 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters was followed by his receipt of the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, making Faulkner one of the most respected living American writers. He continued to write novels and stories as well as essays and plays. Faulkner won the National Book Award for his Collected Stories, published in 1950, and was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for his novels A Fable (1954) and The Reivers (1962). In the 1950s Faulkner was a much-sought-after lecturer throughout the world. In 1957 he became writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, dividing his time between Virginia and Mississippi. In 1959 he suffered serious injuries in horse-riding accidents. Faulkner died of a heart attack on July 6, 1962.
MAJOR WORKS
From the beginning of his career, Faulkner's writing showed the influence of the Gothic tradition. His first great work, The Sound and the Fury, contains elements typical of Southern Gothic literature: grotesque characters, violence, and a dilapidated, decaying setting. The novel chronicles the disintegration of members of the Compson family who are obsessed with and controlled by forces and events from their pasts. The siblings Quentin and Caddy fall from a state of innocence and succumb to the family pattern of incest, erotomania, and suicide. Faulkner called his next novel, Sanctuary, "the most horrific tale I could imagine." Containing graphic violence and extravagant depravity, the crime thriller about the coquettish Temple Drake is a study of human evil that includes a psychopathic bootlegger, corrupt local officials, the trial of an innocent man, and a public lynching. As I Lay Dying charts the journey of a poor family to bury their mother, Addie Bundren, in Jefferson. They make the coffin themselves and survive crossing the flooded Yoknapatawpha River, a fire, and other difficulties before reaching their destination. The novella, composed of fifty-nine interior monologues providing various perspectives through constantly shifting, contrasting points of view, including that of the dead mother, is humorous, tragic, and horrifying.
As I Lay Dying was followed by Faulkner's acclaimed horror story "A Rose for Emily," considered an exemplary work of Southern Gothic fiction. The tale begins with the announcement of the death of Miss Emily Grierson, an alienated spinster living in the South in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. The narrator, who speaks in the "we" voice and appears to represent the people of the town, recounts the story of Emily's life as a lonely and impoverished woman left penniless by her father, who drove away suitors from his overprotected daughter. Emily was left when her father died with a large, dilapidated house, into which the townspeople have never been invited, and there is an almost lurid interest among them when they are finally able to enter the house upon Emily's death. At that point they discover the truth about the extent of Emily's problems: she has kept the body of her lover, a Northerner named Homer Barron, locked in a bedroom since she killed him years before, and she has continued to sleep with him. Some critics initially criticized Faulkner for writing what they saw as an exploitative horror story, but commentators since then have recognized the power of the work as a commentary on the South wrapped up in the past and unable to accept change.
Other notable works by Faulkner with Gothicinspired settings and themes include Light in August, which examines the origins of personal identity and the roots of racial conflicts, and Absalom, Absalom!, about Thomas Sutpen, a poor white man from the Virginia hills who marries an aristocratic Mississippi woman, inadvertently launching a three-generation family cycle of violence, degeneracy, and mental retardation.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Early criticism of Faulkner's fiction ranged from considering it hopelessly incoherent to the work of unparalleled genius. Since the mid-1940s, the latter opinion has prevailed, and critics have come to regard Faulkner as a singular talent and writer of extraordinary scope and power. Since Faulkner's death, his work has been extensively analyzed and critics have remarked that his writing, while distinctively American and Southern, reflects, on a grander scale, the universal values of human life. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner declared that the fundamental theme of his fiction is "the human heart in conflict with itself." One of the most notable ways in which he depicts this struggle is in his portrayal of the corruption and decay of the South, and he uses Gothic imagery and atmosphere in particular to highlight this idea. Gothicism is also used in Faulkner's work to emphasize distorted religious views, the clash between those with power and those without, the isolation of the individual, humans' powerlessness in an indifferent universe, the moral decay of the community, the burden of history, the horrors of humans' treatment of each other, and the problem of evil. The vast body of Faulkner criticism that has been generated since the 1960s has included discussions of the Gothic elements in his writing, which have focused on his particular brand of American Southern Gothic; the use of gothicism to portray Southern dislocation and decadence; the Gothic influences on his writing, including English novelists and Nathaniel Hawthorne; and his influence on younger writers of Southern Gothic such as Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor.
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