The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Faulkner, William Cuthbert
Faulkner, William
Cuthbert
(originally
William
Cuthbert
Falkner
)
(
1897
–
1962
),
American
novelist, born in Mississippi, where his family had long been settled; he spent most of his life there, in the town of Oxford, and the history and legends of the South, and of his own family, were the material of his greater books. After a desultory education and working at various odd jobs, he met
S.
Anderson
while working as a journalist in New Orleans, who encouraged him to write his first novel, Soldier's Pay (
1926
). This was followed by others, including Sartoris (
1929
), the first of the series in which he describes the decline of the Compson and Sartoris families, representative of the Old South, and the rise of the crude and unscrupulous Snopes family. The principal setting of these novels is ‘Jefferson’—a composite picture of several Mississippi towns—in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County. The...
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