• CHILDHOOD
• EDUCATION
• GETTING ESTABLISHED
• CAREER
• ANALYZING FAULKNER
• AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS
• NOTES

Born: 25 September 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi

Died: 6 July 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi

Married: Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin, 20 June 1929

Education: Attended the University of Mississippi

CHILDHOOD

When William Faulkner was born in his parents’ modest frame home, his birth name, William Cuthbert, was chosen by his paternal grandfather, bestowing upon the child the first name and middle initial of his regionally famous great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner. (The family name was actually Falkner, without the u, which the writer added to his name later.) The colonel had fought in the Civil War, built a railroad, and published several books, including a popular novel, The White Rose of Memphis (1881). The young family lived only a year in New Albany, a small county seat in the north central hills region of Mississippi, and then moved north to Ripley, a town rich in associations with the Falkner family’s history in the state. Though Faulkner’s father, Murry Cuthbert Falkner, and his paternal grandfather had both been born in Ripley, the family sojourn here was short, too, just four years. Faulkner grew up in Oxford, southwest of Ripley in Lafayette County, the county seat and home of the University of Mississippi (“Ole Miss”). The family moved there in 1902, when Faulkner was almost five.

Faulkner was the first of his parents’ four children, all boys. Both his mother, Maud Butler Falkner, and his father had grown up in Oxford. His father worked as a freight agent for the Gulf and Chicago Railroad in New Albany when Faulkner was born. Murry Falkner’s position was not so humble as it might sound, however, since the Falkner family owned the railroad and he was working his way up

through the ranks from fireman to conductor and on to an executive position. On the other hand, despite the railroad’s ambitious name, the Gulf and Chicago was a narrow-gauge line that ran for just sixty-two miles, from Middleton, Tennessee, through Ripley, New Albany, and on to Pontotoc, Mississippi. It was founded in 1872 as the Ripley Railroad by Colonel Falkner, the man on whom Faulkner would in some ways model himself and against whom he would measure his own achievement in order to restore his family’s lost fame.

In 1898, promoted to a yet higher rank with the railroad and living in Ripley, where the family name meant a great deal, Murry Falkner must have been happy and optimistic, and two more sons, Murry Charles (called Jack) and John Wesley Thompson III, were born there in quick succession. In 1902, apparently to Murry’s surprise and regret, his father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner, the president of the Gulf and Chicago, announced that he was selling the railroad.

The story Faulkner and his brothers told later was that their grandfather did not give their father the chance he requested to attempt to raise capital and purchase the Gulf and Chicago himself. The Falkners returned to Oxford to live at first in Murry’s father’s large house, called “The Big Place.” There were no more children until a final son, Dean Swift, was born in 1907. He was named for Maud Falkner’s recently deceased mother, Leila Dean Swift Butler, whom the children called “Damuddy.” Murry and Maud Falkner lived out their lives in Oxford, as did three of their four sons, including the writer.¹

In 1905, at the age of eight, Faulkner entered the Oxford Graded School. His mother had read a great deal to him and his brothers, including some of the wild tales of the American frontier humorists, and taught them all to read at an early age. His first-grade teacher, Annie Chandler, presented him with a copy of Thomas Dixon’s exciting novel about the post-Civil War period, The Clansman (1905), later famous as the source of D. W. Griffith’s controversial movie epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). Faulkner was so well prepared for school that he skipped the second grade the following year and entered the third.

The Civil War became a major fascination for Faulkner early in life. His great-grandfather William C. Falkner had used his own money to raise and outfit a regiment in Ripley and had taken the men to Virginia, where they participated in the first Battle of Manassas, also known as the First Battle of Bull Run (21 July 1861). Colonel Falkner was recognized for bravery. At the end of the war’s first year the troops, as was allowed in those days, voted Falkner out as their commander. He returned to Ripley and raised another regiment, the First Mississippi Partisan Rangers. This unit’s exploits are more obscure, but they played a busy role in the war theater of northern Mississippi and central Tennessee, where Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry harassed and thwarted the Union army. Faulkner’s paternal grandfather and two great aunts frequently told him stories of his great-grandfather’s exploits. During his childhood Faulkner’s paternal grandparents were active in the Sons of Confederate Veterans and Daughters of the Confederacy. Faulkner and his brothers had many chances to hear the survivors’ versions of the strife and heroism of the Civil War and to celebrate when new memorials were raised to commemorate the Lost Cause.

Soon school, which Faulkner had’ started with such promise, became a problem. Though he remained enrolled in public school and officially completed the required eleventh grade of high school, he stopped paying much attention to his teachers after the seventh grade. Small in stature, like his mother and his great-grandfather the colonel, Faulkner nonetheless played football avidly, but he also played hooky and generally resisted formal instruction. Anecdotal evidence from schoolmates supports the figurative, if not literal, truth of the adult Faulkner’s statement that he was “an old 8th grade man” who had refused “to accept formal schooling.”² His frequent assertion to interviewers and correspondents that he was without education is neither figuratively nor literally true, for he did accept instruction from several important literary mentors as he matured. He read widely and intelligently all his life, starting with his mother’s instruction and continuing with collections of books gathered by family and friends, as well as those found at the University of Mississippi.

By 1914, the year World War I began, Faulkner had abandoned formal education and begun to adopt behavior aimed at making him seem different in his small town, where he felt outclassed by children whose fathers were more visibly successful than his and by the frequently affluent university students who courted the girls of the town, including the girl that Faulkner himself cared about the most. Growing up in the town where his parents had grown up, his childhood was both idyllic and crisis-ridden, like most childhoods, and it became the source of warm memories and painful recollections, many of which would find a way into his fiction. The pride he felt in the accomplishments of his great-grandfather were complicated by family memories of Colonel Falkner, who had possibly fathered children by a former slave and led a violent life. Before the Civil War he committed two murders on the streets of Ripley but was acquitted in both cases on grounds of self-defense. In 1889 the Colonel was killed on the streets of Ripley by a former business partner.

As Faulkner’s childhood ended, he felt particularly outclassed by other young men in the courtship of young women. He liked girls, but he was shy around many of those in whom he was interested. All his life he expressed complicated feelings of gallantry, sentimentality, and protectiveness for women, along with strong desire and deep mis-trust. The young girl in whom he found a congenial friend and a romantic interest was Estelle Oldham, the woman he eventually married, but not through anything resembling an expected path. Estelle recalled to one of Faulkner’s biographers that in the year of Halley’s comet, 1910, she and Faulkner made a vow that when they grew up, they would marry and live on a farm where they would raise chickens.

Estelle’s popularity with college boys must have fed Faulkner’s uncertainty about himself as much as the simple anguish of adolescence. Both his family’s declining social and business positions and his own unprepossessing appearance as a young man had something to do with his uncertainty, though it was also clearly fed by the puritanical sexual mores of the era and the cult of pure masculinity created by such strong figures as Theodore Roosevelt.

As a boy Faulkner appears to have been happy, busy, well cared for, and advantaged in many ways. As a typical adolescent, he became troubled and uncertain, seeking to compensate for the things that were missing from his self-perception. Faulkner’s paternal grandfather and father were both big men, especially for their time, six feet tall and sol-idly built. Faulkner was not: as an adult he weighed no more than 150 pounds and stood only five feet and five inches tall. As a teenager, he compensated for his small size by combing his hair high in the front and playing the rough school football of the time. Such conflicts do not always produce great writers, but in great writers they often lead to the development of great characters and great stories. Such was the case with Faulkner.

EDUCATION

In 1914 the seventeen-year-old Faulkner was introduced to Phil Stone of Oxford, Mississippi, four years his senior. The two began a complex friendship that set Faulkner directly on the path to becoming a published author. Stone’s family was well-to-do, with a large, important law firm that operated offices in Oxford and in the Delta town of Charleston, Mississippi. But Stone had never been part of the rough-and-tumble small-town life that characterized the childhood of Faulkner and his brothers. Stone was the best classicist in the local Latin school as a boy, but he also suffered from childhood illnesses that frequently kept him in bed at the family’s columned mansion not far from the center of Oxford. During these periods of convalescence he read widely.³ By 1914 Stone had earned a B.A. degree at the University of Mississippi and was just returning home from earning a second B.A. at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

The bookish, aristocratic Stone had a modern outlook. He had spent his year at Yale studying English, French, and the classics to supplement his B.A. from Ole Miss. Sharing with Faulkner The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), compiled by Arthur Quiller-Couch, Stone opened the young man’s eyes to the range of English poetry. He began suggesting other books for Faulkner to read, encouraged his experiments in poetry, and introduced the still provincial boy to exciting—and decidedly unliterary—aspects of Memphis and Delta culture, including gambling houses and brothels. Stone’s tutelage, from 1914 until about 1922, exposed Faulkner to many writers new to him and probably also helped him to reassimilate, from a more literary perspective, the considerable reading he had done previously in the libraries of his Falkner grandfather and parents. Together Stone and Faulkner reviewed classical texts, read Balzac out loud together, and explored the new poetry, from the French Symbolists to such transitional figures as Edwin Arlington Robinson and A. E. Housman. Vicariously, at least, they participated in the shift in American literary and artistic culture from a transitional realism and naturalism into modernism.

But in 1914 Faulkner had many other interests, too. World War I had begun and he was fascinated by the exploits of the aviator war heroes, the British, French, and German “aces” of combat in the air. “I had seen an aeroplane and my mind was filled with names: Ball, and Immelman and Boelcke, and Guynemer and Bishop, and I was waiting … until I would be old enough or free enough or anyway could get to France and become glorious and beribboned too.”⁴ He was also an adolescent and in love. He discovered the sensual poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne, the lushness of which made him “its slave,” and then the antidote to Swinburne, the Edwardian Housman. Faulkner carried a tiny copy of Housman’s dry and mournful poetry collection A Shrop-shire Lad (1896) in his pocket as he took long walks in the rolling hills of north Mississippi.⁵ Still, as a writer he made no obvious breakthroughs before 1918, though clearly his career as a poet had started.

In April 1918 Estelle Oldham, the girl Faulkner hoped to marry, instead married a lawyer named Cornell Franklin. As the wed-ding date approached, Phil Stone, apparently with some instigation from both Faulkner’s and Estelle’s families, invited Faulkner to visit him at Yale, to which Stone had returned to take a second degree in law, supplementing the law course he had recently completed at the University of Mississippi.

In New Haven, some two weeks before Estelle’s marriage was to take place in Oxford, Faulkner found a job with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company as a clerk, using bookkeeping experience gained in his grandfather’s bank in Oxford. Stone kept him busy otherwise with an elaborate plot to enter training for the air war. After Faulkner was turned down by the American armed forces because of his small, five-foot-five-inch stature, they decided he would have a better chance with England’s Royal Air Force, especially if Faulkner were to present him-self as a British citizen. So Faulkner added the u to his last name for the first time, developed a clipped British accent on top of his light-voiced Southern drawl, and armed himself with a letter of recommendation from Stone praising his good character. The letter stated shamelessly that Faulkner had a British mother and an American father, and was signed as if by an Anglican clergyman named Twymberly-Thorndyke.

Whether by virtue of these devious and witty stratagems or because the British were in dire need of more pilots, Faulkner was accepted as a training cadet in the Canadian program of the Royal Air Force. He returned briefly to Oxford in late June 1918 and in mid July took the train to Toronto, where he began his studies in a tough ground school. Before he graduated from ground school and managed to make a single training flight, the war ended in November and he was released from service, still a lowly cadet with the white band of the wingless on his cap. Nevertheless, like the noncombatant Ernest Hemingway (who was, however, wounded while serving as a Red Cross ambulance driver in Italy), Faulkner returned home wearing an officer’s uniform and telling tales of war. His officer’s uniform included a crushed overseas ser-vice cap, a bright set of aviator’s wings, and a cane that he used to support himself because of his “injuries.” Faulkner was not entitled to any of these trappings, not even the cane, though he did receive in the mail early in January 1919 a postwar honorary lieutenancy.

Although his contribution to the war effort amounted only to a few months of training in Canada, Faulkner made it a transforming experience, as did many other contemporary American writers who did not serve in combat, such as John Dos Passos, E. E. Cummings, and Hemingway. Like his false record of military service abroad, Faulkner’s university education was also essentially a fiction, but in fact he gained much from association with universities. As he wrote his mother from New Haven, the British recruiting officer with whom he worked was going to allow him to enlist “as a second year Yale man” so he could be eligible for a commission as an officer right away,⁶ and other cadets in his unit recalled that he said he was from Yale. Of course Faulkner did not actually attend Yale, but in New Haven, rooming with the law stu-dent Stone, his evenings and weekends were literary and taken among university men. Stone introduced him to other poets and took him regularly to a good bookstore that served the Yale community. When Faulkner returned to Oxford, Mississippi, following Armistice Day, his parents were living on the University of Mississippi campus, where his father now worked in the university’s business office. Thus, Faulkner had entree to university facilities and campus life, although he was not a student.

Faulkner’s life after the war seemed even more casual than it had been before he went away. Older and wiser and more confident, he hung around the University of Mississippi campus more than he had before. His parents lived in a former fraternity house, in which he had a tower room. Faulkner honored his father’s wishes and entered the university as a first-year student. He later told the critic and literary historian Malcolm Cowley that he planned to study European languages, but he apparently only took a couple of classes in French and a course in Spanish. He dropped out of Ole Miss within a year and adopted the role, familiar in university towns, of the unregistered hanger-on, socializing with students and publishing drawings and poems in student publications. Faulkner’s first publication in a nationally distributed journal was the poem “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” which appeared in the 6 August 1919 issue of The New Republic. The title, borrowed from a poem of the same name by Stéphane Mallarmé, revealed his knowledge of the French Symbolist poets. Faulkner showed in his university drawings and writing a familiarity with the work of decadent artists and writers from both sides of the Atlantic, such as the English illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and the American novelist James Branch Cabell.⁷

GETTING ESTABLISHED

After Faulkner dropped out of the university but continued to live at home and eat at the family table, his father not unreasonably wanted his twenty-four-year-old son to secure a remunerative job. Faulkner’s first effort to evade work was a trip suggested by Stone and Stark Young, a Mississippi native who had graduated from Ole Miss, taught there briefly, and was now a successful writer living in New York. On a visit to Oxford, Young invited Faulkner to come to New York and stay with him, and Stone encouraged Faulkner to accept the invitation. When Faulkner ventured to the city in the fall of 1921, how-ever, Young was away most of the time and Faulkner had trouble finding a place to stay. He got nothing more from the New York trip than a part-time position as a clerk in a bookstore. The manager was a bright, well-read young woman named Elizabeth Prall, who later married one of America’s most important modernist writers of fiction, Sherwood Anderson.

The news from home was that the Falkners and some family friends—including Stone—were exerting political influence so Faulkner could win an appointment as postmaster of the fourth-class post office on the University of Mississippi campus. He returned to Oxford and began work at the post office in 1922. The job was, in effect, the kind of government sinecure that nineteenth-century American writers such as Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne received. Faulkner developed a reputation as a reluctant postmaster. He was said to sit behind the closed service windows and read customers’ magazines before putting them in their boxes, to pitch fourth-class mail into garbage cans behind the building, and to ignore pleas for stamps or mail even when people banged on the shuttered service windows.

Faulkner’s job paid well, and if it kept him from wandering, it also gave him leisure to read. It put him in touch with current magazines and enlarged his acquaintance with well-trained professors and intellectually curious students of liberal arts and law. Stone was away some of the time working in his family’s Delta law office, but he ordered dozens of current books for him and Faulkner to read and discuss together. The French scholar Michel Gresset has shown that several of the books Stone ordered in 1922 were reviewed by Faulkner in student publications that year.⁸ Stone’s purchases included James Joyce’s Por-trait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Ulysses (1922), many volumes by contemporary poets, and works of classical literature.

Like the books in Faulkner’s library at the time of his death, the books purchased by Stone in 1922 represent only a part of what the postmaster read. In an unfinished introduction to The Sound and the Fury (1929) written in 1933, Faulkner refers to the books that he had read “ten years before”—the post office years’and cites “the Flauberts and Dostoievskys and Conrads.“⁹ “Faulkner’s Masters,” an essay by Michael Millgate, suggests placing Faulkner’s reading in two categories: works from which he blatantly borrowed and works that touched him so profoundly that he returned to them repeatedly for inspiration and models of achievement. According to Millgate’s research, Faulkner’s masters were Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Miguel de Cervantes, authors whose works Faulkner named repeatedly, along with the Bible, as those he turned to for pleasure and inspiration.¹⁰ In “The Apprenticeship of William Faulkner,” Richard P. Adams uses such tangible evidence to argue that Faulkner was “a highly sophisticated young man” who, living outside the academy in Oxford, Mississippi, “could not take his culture for granted but had to sweat for it.”¹¹ When he became a famous writer and submitted to questions from students about how they should pre-pare to write fiction, his standard advice was “Read everything, read all the time.”

The year Faulkner began his tenure at the post office, 1922, was an annus mirabilis of modernist literature in English, the year of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, as well as the one-volume abridgment of James G. Frazer’s influential anthropo-logical study of the origins of magic and religion, The Golden Bough (1890; enlarged, 1911-1915). The two following years were hardly less important, even if Faulkner had read only such magazines as The Dial, The Little Review, Vanity Fair, and a periodical anthology such as Living Age. The book list of works by “the moderns” during Faulkner’s thirty-six months in the post office is daunting evidence of the international renaissance going on in English and American letters.

The three years in the University of Mississippi post office also shaped Faulkner’s career by providing opportunities to publish essays, more than a dozen poems, a book column, and sophisticated drawings in. campus publications. These local publications helped him begin his career as a writer in several ways. Faulkner learned to analyze poetry, drama, and fiction for his book column. He experimented with several genres. He was much advantaged by living on a university campus where there were literary and dramatic societies, visiting speakers and performers, and more current publications in the library than he would ever see on the newsstand in the local drugstore. When his apprentice poems appeared in University of Mississippi publications, they were frequently derided by other students, just as Faulkner himself was, for pretension and obscurity. But this derision, his responses to which were good-natured, helped prove he was avante garde and may have steeled him for the subsequent rejection that is almost every new writer’s lot.

Most of Faulkner’s first publications were regional, with the exception of “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune” and his first book, a volume of poems titled The Marble Faun (1924). Stone helped him place the book with Four Seas of Boston. The firm required financial support from their authors, but they had published early work by important modernists such as Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams. Four Seas took an interest in the first submission Faulkner made to them, a volume called “Orpheus and Other Poems,” but at the time he did not have the money to back its publication. After Faulkner had shaped his poems into a better arrangement, creating a framing element that gave the collection a coherent structure, Stone was willing to risk his own money. He paid the $400 it took to launch the volume, and he under-took to write a preface and supply pictures and a mailing list for a publicity campaign.

Faulkner, or Stone, seemed to think that it would take a trip to Europe to season him and give the same impetus to his writing career that the expatriate life had apparently given other American writers of his generation. It was, however, not in Europe but in New Orleans that Faulkner made the first great strides in getting himself established. He had placed a poem in the New Orleans literary magazine The Double Dealer in 1922 and traveled to the city that year to call on the editors of the magazine. He returned in 1924 and met Sherwood Anderson through his wife, Elizabeth Prall Anderson. Meanwhile, Stone conspired with the regional postal inspector from nearby Corinth, Mississippi, and some of Faulkner’s friends to insure that the writer’s campus post-office employment came to an end.¹² Faulkner eagerly accepted the U.S. Post Office Department’s judgment about his unprofessional work and resigned before the end of 1924.

At the beginning of 1925 Faulkner returned with Stone to New Orleans, ostensibly as a way station while he made preparations for pas-sage to Europe on a cheap freighter. Anderson was away on a lecture tour discussing “The Modern Writer,” so his wife, Elizabeth, invited Faulkner to share their apartment until he found a place to live. When Anderson returned, he and Elizabeth introduced their young friend to the artist William Spratling. Faulkner moved in with Spratling on a narrow street beside St. Louis Cathedral. He found New Orleans so congenial, receptive of his talents, and inspiring that he stayed six months before finally shipping out. Like many in the French Quarter, the Andersons found Faulkner interesting and talented. Arguably, he made more new friends during this period in New Orleans than at any other time of his life.

Faulkner turned increasingly to prose fiction, writing imaginative vignettes about street scenes in the French Quarter and short-short stories based on some of the same scenes or their themes. His ambition was in such high gear that he had begun placing work in regional publications before Anderson’s return from his lecture tour. Faulkner’s newspaper sketches, bearing what became a series title, “Mirrors of Chartres Street,” began to appear in the Times-Picayune on 8 February 1925. A set of similar but shorter narrative vignettes about characters in the French Quarter streets was published almost simultaneously in the January-February issue of The Double Dealer, along with an essay and a poem. These pieces show Faulkner’s developing eye and ear for character and characterizing action. But the young Mississippian, for all his recent reading in prose fiction, still needed a mentor for the novel. When Anderson returned from his lecture tour, Faulkner, as his letters home show, proudly struck up a close friendship with the garrulous author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919).

Anderson’s friendship and tutelage was, by every account, the most important association Faulkner established in New Orleans. Taking over the role formerly played by Stone, Anderson was even more important than Stone in several ways. He was a noted writer who had recently won the prestigious prize for fiction awarded by The Dial. He was the author of volumes of stories and novels, as well as essays and highly fictionalized memoirs. Elizabeth Anderson must also be considered an influence on Faulkner, for she was not only knowledgeable about books but representative of the “new” women who were taking up writing, aviation, and other vocations formerly reserved for males alone.

The friendship with Anderson was in many respects based upon mutual feelings. As Faulkner told a Japanese audience in 1955, “he was one of the finest, sweetest people I ever knew. He was much better than anything he ever wrote.”¹³ The two writers shared small-town backgrounds, had similar fathers, and were both interested in horses. Anderson was a great talker, and Faulkner was a good listener who often remained silent. Anderson began to fill the gaps in Faulkner’s artistic education.

Listening to Anderson, who was then writing another loosely autobiographical novel, Faulkner learned several important lessons about composing fiction. The first was that writing is daily and unremitting work, not simply inspired facility when the mood strikes. Another lesson was that serious fiction demands penetrating investigation of character and event: a writer has to know human nature and the new psychology to get it right. The most crucial lesson, however, revealed in Faulkner’s letters to his mother from this period, was Anderson’s granting Faulkner a license to steal and to lie. That is, as Anderson explained to Faulkner, in order to create fiction, one must take elements from other people’s experiences as well as one’s own, and heighten and shape them until they make a satisfactory and compelling story. Working on this principle, Faulkner and Anderson played games of invention, and Anderson proved his point almost immediately by publishing in The Dial— the excellent literary magazine that had recently honored him for his writing—a story loosely based on Faulkner, titled “A Meeting South.”¹⁴ Thus, Anderson demonstrated to his new protege how to reinvent someone else’s life for fictional pur-poses. Faulkner got the message, as he explained to his mother. She had inquired about a story in the April 1925 issue of The Dial that she had heard portrayed her son. He replied proudly:

Yes, the story of Mr Anderson’s was started by me. It is not documentary—that is, a true incident. I just kind of cranked him up. What really happens, you know, never makes a good yarn. You have got to get an impulse from somewhere and then embroider it. And that is what Sherwood did in this case. He has done another about me as I really am, not as a fictitious character. He is now writing a book about childhood, his own childhood; and 1 have told him several things about my own which he is putting in as having happened to him.

1 am now giving away the secrets of our profession, so be sure not to divulge them. It would be kind of like a Elk or a Mason or a Beaver or some-thing giving away the pass word.¹⁵

Faulkner’s response to this secret information was immediate. He launched several projects in long prose fiction, possibly several at once, all based loosely on his own life or experience. In a very short time Faulkner finished what became his first novel, which he had tentatively titled “Mayday,” punning upon the international distress call that expressed both the ancient rites of spring and a postwar despair akin to the opening line of Eliot’s The Waste Land, “April is the cruellest month….” Anderson recommended the novel to his publisher, Horace Liveright of Boni and Liveright, who had published Hemingway’s first book at Anderson’s recommendation. Liveright accepted the novel, and Faulkner was on his way to a thirty-six-year career, during which he produced eighteen additional novels and more than one hundred short stories. He was not, however, exactly established.

The novel was renamed Soldiers’ Pay and published by Boni and Liveright on 25 February 1926. The story concerns three World War I veterans returning home after the war and is set in Charlestown, Georgia, a fictionalized version of Oxford, Mississippi. The book met with reasonable critical success but did not establish Faulkner’s fame, fortune, or special genius. Still, the promise of some income from the book and more from sketches like those he had done for the Times-Picayune encouraged him to take the long delayed trip abroad. Faulkner settled in for the fall in Paris. Mostly solitary and without extra money when his hopes for income from America fell through, he visited museums and private galleries showing modernist artwork. When he was not musing in the Luxembourg Gardens, he made progress on two new projects, one a satiric roman a clef about his friends in New Orleans and the other a comedic parody of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which did not come off. Unfortunately, the satire on Faulkner’s friends did, but he did not complete it until he returned to New Orleans. The book was titled Mosquitoes, inviting the reader to equate the irritating insects with the New Orleans bohemians Faulkner portrayed. When Mosquitoes was published in 1927, the bohemians were not amused, least of all Anderson, of whom the novel’s Dawson Fairchild is a whimsical and affectionate portrait.

Since the girl to whom Faulkner dedicated the novel dropped him, announcing her engagement just as the novel was published, the writer headed back to Oxford, Mississippi, to live at his parents’ house. His next project of embroidering the truth was about his own family, and, like Soldiers’ Pay, it too underwent a change of title. Conceived as “Flags in the Dust,” it was also a story of life after the war like his first novel, or like Hemingway’s short stories “Soldier’s Home” and “Big Two-Hearted River.” The new novel concerned the homecoming of various young men, black and white, to a rural Southern town. The central figure, Bayard Sartoris, has lost his twin brother, the favored of the two, who has died glamorously in aerial combat. Like the Falkners, the Sartoris family has a tradition of violence and vainglory, centered especially on a great-grandfather who, like Colonel William C. Falkner, cut a large figure as Civil War hero and north Mississippi railroad builder. The generation of Faulkner’s parents is conveniently lost offstage in an epidemic, so Faulkner is free to fictionalize the legend of his great grandfather, the “Old Colonel”; the futile life of his grandfather, John Wesley Thompson Falkner (called the “Young Colonel”); and the restless estrangement of members of his own generation, white and black.

To Faulkner’s great shock, the publisher of his first two novels, Boni and Liveright, turned down the book that he claimed to be the “damdest best book you’ll look at this year, and any other publisher.”¹⁶ Finally, Harcourt, Brace accepted the book on the condition that he cut it by as much as a third. Faulkner, however, was relatively oblivious to this opportunity, since in his unhappiness and ambition he had sat down to write for himself a book that he at first planned to call “Twilight.” The story opens with four siblings, the Compson children, playing in a vast backyard on the day of their grandmother’s death. They are unaware that they have been sent out of the house because their grandmother, called “Damuddy” (like Faulkner’s own maternal grandmother), is being prepared for her funeral.

Faulkner assigned Ben Wasson, an Ole Miss friend now working as a literary agent, the task of performing most of the required surgery to cut down on the length of “Flags in the Dust.” The revised novel was published as Sartoris on 31 January 1929. Faulkner then offered Harcourt, Brace The Sound and the Fury, as he had renamed “Twilight.” They declined, but immediately a young and progressive editor with the firm, Harrison Smith, said he would publish the strange four-part novel under his own new imprint, Cape and Smith.

With the acceptance of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner was fully established. He had found his voice, his emotions, his vocation, and even a select audience. It would be a long time before he would be assured of a regular income from writing fiction, but The Sound and the Fury became his standard, the work through which he learned what art could achieve and a book that he did not want to shame by writing anything cheap, easy, or less aesthetically daring. He was confirmed in the life not simply of the writer but of the artist.

CAREER

Faulkner’s career did not immediately take off with the remarkable achievement of The Sound and the Fury. It was potentially so obscure for American audiences of his day that Cape and Smith took the precaution of publishing the novel with an explanatory pamphlet by Evelyn Scott, the author of a popular recent novel about the Civil War, The Wave (1928). The Sound and the Fury was published on 7 October 1929, just before the crash of the American stock market. Perhaps even more important for his artistic life, Faulkner, who had lived with other people all his life, except for the few months in cheap Pari-sian lodgings in 1925, married and assumed responsibility for a highly distraught wife and her two children by a previous marriage. The woman was Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood sweetheart, but the marriage was not a romantic reunion.

Following her marriage in 1918, Estelle had lived in Shanghai with her lawyer husband, but he traveled frequently, leaving her alone in an alien culture, and apparently he was not a faithful husband. In 1927 she returned to her parents’ home and filed for divorce, a process that took two years. Faulkner had sustained a relationship with Estelle even while she was married, presenting her with passionate poems, but during some of this period he had also courted others, especially Helen Baird in New Orleans, the girl to whom Mosquitoes was dedicated and who, like Estelle, dropped him to marry someone else. From childhood Estelle had been treated like a princess by her well-to-do Oxford family, and her first marriage had storybook qualities: a dashing Ole Miss-trained lawyer taking her off to an opulent, if neglected, life in the Orient. Now, though bright and attractive, she was about to become a young divorcee with two small children.

Faulkner stepped in. As he wrote his publisher, Smith, “Hal, I want $500.00 I am going to be married. Both want to and have to. THIS PART IS CONFIDENTIAL, UTTERLY. For my honor and the sanity—I believe life—of a woman. This is not bunk; neither am I being sucked in. We grew up together and I dont think she could fool me in this way; that is, make me believe that her mental condition, her nerves, are this far gone.”¹⁷ The two were wed on 20 June 1929. After a honeymoon in Pascagoula, Mississippi, during which he read the proof sheets of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner and his new family moved into an apartment in an elegant old house in Oxford not far from the Ole Miss campus. His father secured him a job as night supervisor in the university’s power plant. With great confidence, as well as the kind of drive that financial responsibility can engender, Faulkner undertook a remarkable run of creative work. He composed his fifth novel, As I Lay Dying (1930), in little more than six weeks while sitting in the small office of the power plant at night and placed his first short story in a national magazine—“A Rose for Emily,” for which Forum paid him $50. Faulkner launched a successful campaign to place short fiction with more than a dozen other magazines and worked at revising his scandalous novel of bootleggers, brothels, and rape, Sanctuary (1931), in hopes of attracting a wide popular audience.

Faulkner bought a neglected and run-down antebellum house on the outskirts of Oxford and began to restore it himself in the after-noons when he had finished his daily stints of writing. He named it “Rowan Oak,” after a Scottish legend about a tree that protected against witches and ill fortune. Estelle conceived their first child, but the girl, whom they named for Faulkner’s great-aunt Alabama, was born prematurely and survived only a few days. Sanctuary, published on 9 February 1931, achieved Faulkner’s intended goal and made his name in the media in ways less sensational fiction could not have done. He was lionized in New York and received offers for dramatic work and Holly-wood writing.

These events set several patterns for Faulkner’s life until well after he won the Nobel Prize in 1950. A particularly strong element was family life at Rowan Oak. In 1933 Estelle gave birth to a healthy daughter, Jill, who joined her half brother, Malcolm, and half sister, Victoria, in the household. Faulkner’s nephews, the sons of his brother John, and his niece, Dean, the daughter of his brother Dean, were often at the house. Faulkner’s father died in 1932, making him the paterfamilias of the clan. He visited his mother almost every day he was in town as he walked to the post office to mail manuscripts and check for letters of acceptance. Though he would feel obliged to make many trips to Holly-wood to earn the large salaries paid by the motion-picture industry, Rowan Oak increasingly symbolized for him the rootedness of his writing in north Mississippi. It was there that he wrote Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (1939; corrected text published with Faulkner’s original title, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, 1995), The Hamlet (1940), and Go Down, Moses (1942), and dozens of short stories published in America’s most popular magazines, such as The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, Scribner’s Magazine, and The American Mercury.

Another strong element in Faulkner’s life, as the list of novels up to 1942 indicates, was headlong composition. His list of achievements as a writer after he moved into Rowan Oak is perhaps without parallel in serious

American writing; the list of novels does not include other work he produced in this period, such as screenplays, a second book of poems (A Green Bough, 1933), and two short-story collections (These 13, 1931, and Doctor Martino and Other Stories, 1934). Faulkner’s strenuous writing schedule led to days or weeks of sheer collapse during which he sought escape from his troubles in binge drinking.

Faulkner’s financial responsibilities grew, though never quite beyond his ability to assume them. He supported his mother, cared for his wife’s parents when their fortunes took a turn for the worse, and took on full responsibility for the widow and child of his youngest brother, Dean, when the young man was killed while flying the airplane Faulkner had given him. He also made some financial investment in the life of his brother John, for whom the Depression created problems, and made a loan he could not afford to his old friend and mentor Phil Stone when Stone’s law practice put him into financial jeopardy. Faulkner provided housing and daily necessities for the African American fami-lies who lived on his property, and not merely because they worked there. His old nurse, Caroline “Callie” Barr, was in her eighties when he moved into Rowan Oak, and in an age when social services were virtu-ally absent in American society, he took care of her every need. When she died in 1940, he wrote his editor in New York that he was sending back the proof sheets of The Hamlet unread because after the death of the matriarch of his family—Mammy Callie—he simply did not feel like reading them. His next novel, Go Down, Moses, not only featured a dignified and moving portrait of a woman much like her, it was dedicated to her memory.

Increasingly, the settings and characters of Faulkner’s fiction mingled inextricably with the people and places of his existence. In 1936, when his new publisher, Random House, was as uncertain about the ability of Absalom, Absalom! to engage an American audience as Smith had been about The Sound and the Fury in 1929, the firm invited Faulkner to include a chronology and a map of Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional setting of much of his work. The map, which is still published at the end of modern editions of the novel, has less to do with the setting of Absalom, Absalom! than with the settings of Faulkner’s previous novels. The Yoknapatawpha county seat, Jefferson, was based closely on Oxford.

Faulkner’s marriage endured until his death, though it was not the center of his life. Shortly after he married, he wrote a story titled “Second Hand Wife,” and that motif of the secondhand appears to have been an element of strain in his marriage. Estelle had wed another man and had two children, only then returning and agreeing to marry Faulkner. He seems to have undertaken the marriage out of a sense of duty; as his letters indicate, he had a mature understanding that marriage and romance are not the same thing at all. In late 1935, while working in Hollywood, he began a tender and happy love affair with Meta Carpenter, a beautiful young woman who worked as script super-visor for the director Howard Hawks. The affair continued even after Faulkner brought his wife and daughter out to Hollywood to live with him in 1936. The end of the romance with Carpenter the following year was a terrible blow for him, but he could not commit to divorce, fearing the loss of Rowan Oak and limited access to Jill, who meant everything to him. Faulkner used the end of the affair as material for The Wild Palms. Later, after Nobel Prize fame and financial freedom, he became involved with two attractive and intelligent women young enough to be his daughters and had a fling with a Swedish woman he met when in Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize.

The period from 1942, following the publication of Go Down, Moses, to 1948, when Faulkner’s career revived with the powerful and still much-praised novel Intruder in the Dust (1948), was the lowest point of his personal as well as his writing life. The period was characterized by long stays in Hollywood, heavy drinking, strife at home, and increasing personal doubt about whether he had lost his powers as a novelist. Some critics—the historians Joel Williamson and Daniel Singal, for example—see Absalom, Absalom! as the last strong breath in his career. Others, including such Faulkner authorities as Millgate and Cleanth Brooks, regard The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses as highly as the great early work and conceive of the books from 1948 on as uneven but still showing evidence of the old brilliance.

Faulkner’s “revival,” if that is what one can call it, was not altogether the result of his own restored will power. Malcolm Cowley sought out Faulkner for a project that changed his writing life for the good. In 1945 Cowley, who admired Faulkner’s writing, proposed an anthology of excerpts from his books as a volume in the Viking Portable series. Revisiting his previous work and writing an explanatory piece about the Compson family of The Sound and the Fury convinced Faulkner that the talent and even the fire were still there. The Portable Faulkner not only showcased much of Faulkner’s most brilliant and affecting work, it appeared in 1946, just as thousands of young men who had fought in the war, and young women who had waited it out, were coming to college campuses in unprecedented waves. A new, more savvy readership in the United States was prepared to read Faulkner’s books in ways that few Americans could have when they were first published. The Europeans, who had already been sophisticated readers for some time, helped Faulkner win the Nobel Prize, and his renewed confidence helped him finish many projects he had pro-posed as far back as the 1930s and early 1940s.

Faulkner again wrote novels—Intruder in the Dust, Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959)—and collected his short stories (Knight’s Gambit, 1949; Collected Stories of William Faulkner, 1950; Big Woods, 1955). All the while he traveled extensively for the U.S. Department of State as an intellectual ambassador to countries that sided with the West in the Cold War. He gave speeches and wrote public letters on topics such as American individualism and Southern racism. In 1954 his daughter, Jill, married a West Point graduate whose study of law took him to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. When Faulkner and his wife visited there the writer found an environment he liked very much, especially the elegant horse farms of Albemarle County and the fox-hunting culture. His visits to Charlottesville grew longer, and when the University of Virginia offered him a position as writer-in-residence, he eagerly accepted and added yet another routine to his life. Still traveling, still having affairs, and still drinking so heavily on occasion that he required medical attention, Faulkner lived and wrote in Charlottesville for much of each year, visiting Oxford, Mississippi, to care for Rowan Oak and to train horses (since he had no farm in Charlottesville).

The return trips to Oxford still meant a great deal to Faulkner, and as if to honor those visits he wrote a novel about his childhood, horses, and the coming of the automobile age. The work explored the difficult question of how a boy can carry the idealism of his youth through the crucible of adolescence into adulthood without becoming disillusioned or cynical. He chose a Scots-dialect word, reaver, for the title, “The Reavers”—meaning “stealers,” as in horse stealers, but also referring to those aspects of growing up that steal one’s dreams and innocence. Random House suggested a different spelling, and the novel became The Reivers (1962). It was dedicated to his grandchildren, not merely to Jill’s sons but also to the children of his stepdaughter Victoria and stepson Malcolm.

The Reivers was a great success. Faulkner’s income was also increasing from movie sales of previous literary properties, increased sales of his books that were being taught in colleges, and even booming sales of commercially marketed paperback editions, which featured lurid covers emphasizing sexuality and female undress. He began making plans to purchase a substantial farm estate in the Charlottesville area as his permanent address.

In April 1962, Faulkner and his wife, daughter, and son-in-law traveled to West Point, where Faulkner was invited to address the cadet corps and read from his new novel. All these events were very gratifying to him, clear evidence that he had restored the luster the “Old Colonel,” his great-grandfather William C. Falkner, had brought to the family name. He had become world famous as the author of some of the most advanced fiction of the modern period. He was a political man now, too, making addresses and widely read pronouncements on the American dream and America’s responsibility to live up to its dream of democracy. Being invited to West Point was a capstone—not the sub-mission to the Federal army his great-grandfather’s generation had had to make but an honor bestowed on very few, none of them writers, by the military academy. If West Point had made him an honorary general—the rank Colonel Falkner coveted and never received—the visit would have been perfect, but it was good enough without that honor. Some of the most genial photographs ever taken of Faulkner resulted from this trip.

Later that spring Faulkner won the Gold Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, its highest honor. In July, while back in Oxford to see about things at Rowan Oak, he was thrown hard from his horse, Temptress (“Tempy”). The injury to his back required medical attention, and he drank heavily to numb the pain that prevented him from sleeping. Faulkner was eventually taken by ambulance to the sanatorium in the small town of Byhalia, Mississippi, where he had often gone for treatment when he had overindulged. He died there on 6 July 1962 of a heart attack, at the age of sixty-four.

ANALYZING FAULKNER

Faulkner’s most significant experience, if judged by novels such as Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury, was family life—especially the drama of young people struggling to grow up in communi-ties where social values or even family history and ambition make retaining the idealism of youth very difficult. His habit of writing about declining or tragedy-haunted families in the county-seat towns of Mississippi is not solely the result of a romantic imagination, judicious reading of family-chronicle novels, or explorations of modern psychology. It is, in effect, Faulkner’s own family story. His literary aspirations were not an aberration at the end of the family line, how-ever; they actually originated with Colonel Falkner, who was not only a railroad builder and a murderer, but also the author of two book length poems, two novels, a play (now lost), and a lively account of his travels in Europe. When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the young Faulkner told his Oxford Graded School teachers that he wanted to be a writer like his great-grandfather.

Like Sartoris, The Sound and the Fury is the story of a family in decline. One of the Compson children, Benjy, is regarded as an idiot; the daughter, Caddy, is thought to be promiscuous. The family has mortgaged everything in order to send another son, Quentin, to Harvard so that he can recoup their fortunes, but he ends up committing suicide while studying there. The only “sane” Compson offspring in The Sound and the Fury is Jason, a dishonest, blustering racist and sexist who curses his family, mocks its history, and fails at everything he touches. The Sutpens of Absalom, Absalom! and the McCaslins of Go Down, Moses are similarly beset with family problems. Throughout Faulkner’s canon, from a first appearance in Sartoris through the trilogy of novels devoted to them (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion), the Snopes family multiplies with a flawed figure at its helm, the joyless, impotent materialist Flem Snopes. The Snopes story “Barn Burning” (1939) is richly suggestive of the problems of family loyalty, the remoteness of family authority figures, and the ambivalent idealism of youth.

Though family is not at the center of Sanctuary and The Wild Palms, the lives of the central female figures in both novels, Temple Drake and Charlotte Rittenmeyer, respectively, are affected by virtue of their having grown up with four brothers. Light in August recalls family and loss of family. In The Reivers Faulkner finally created a protagonist who can succeed in growing up and taking mature responsibility for the inevitable onset of “non-virtue,” receiving proper acknowledgment and moral guidance from a powerful grandfather. The name of the family, which has blood ties to the McCaslins of Go Down, Moses, is Priest.

Faulkner wrote with great sensitivity about young people growing up. His nephews still speak warmly of his interest in young people and his solicitude for them. People who were children in Oxford during his years in residence there have recalled that he always would stop on the street and ask them how they were getting along. He was, as reported by members of his old scout troop, the best scoutmaster anyone had ever seen, inventive and instructive (though removed from duty by the sponsoring church because of rumors about his drinking).

Adult folly—self-importance, greed, arrogance, mean-spiritedness, self-indulgence, alcoholism, and shame—repeatedly gets in the way of the lives of young people who seek sound values, consistency, wisdom, and even love from the people under whose dubious care they must live. As in many Southern novels, almost the only place such values and care can be found is in the cabins and kitchens and backyards that are ruled morally but affectionately by much-oppressed African American women and men.

The deep South in which Faulkner lived had a unique unpleasantness for African Americans. As Williamson has demonstrated, white racism became much more virulent in the years of Faulkner’s youth than it had previously been: “During the turn-of-the-century decades, the very years in which Faulkner was born and came of age, the racial picture in the South changed radically, “creating a” confusion of race, sex, and violence” that resulted in scores of lynchings and perpetual threats of violence to members of the black community.¹⁸ As a child Faulkner witnessed a lynching, and he later wrote stories about such horrors. He came to understand the nature of the antipathy of poor white families toward equally poor African Americans. Rural white people did not have the same experiences with African Americans that town dwellers did. As Faulkner wrote in an essay on Mississippi in 1954, the rural whites’ heritage was one of “bitter hatred and fear and economic rivalry of the Negroes who farmed little farms no larger than and adjacent to their own,”¹⁹ and often did it better with fewer resources.

The rural world was a colorful, when not cruel, source of eccentricity, hilarity, and even poignance. As a child and a young man Faulkner visited country outposts where he observed events and characters that served him well in such books as As I Lay Dying and the Snopes novels. He developed a broad sympathy for people on both sides of the racial equation in rural Mississippi and learned much more than to hate the violence or pity the poverty of his country neighbors. As a reviewer in as unlikely a place as Brooklyn, New York, testified in 1940 upon reading The Hamlet, “William Faulkner has gone back to the old writing ground, Yoknapatawpha County, to come to grips with the common man. The glamorous in-love-with-death Sartorises, the beautiful and damned Sutpens of pre-war vintage, are gone from the earth, leaving the rock-bottom humanity of a sharecropper community. Even the negro-characters in The Hamlet are incidental. Here a southerner has ceased to blame the Negro for the ills of the South (either blame or fear), just as in The Wild Palms, a man ceased from ’blaming the woman.’ The hamlet is a group of common people who are in for it all right, but who cooperate raucously at their own undoing.”²⁰ Reviewing Collected Stories of William Faulkner a decade later, the poet Horace Gregory observed, “His great accomplishment is of one who is never blind to the conflicting forces of evil, of honor, of loyalty, of spiritual death and earthly love, and if, like some of the Elizabethan dramatists, he is regional and of the American South in the same sense that they were island Englishmen: if, like them, he leaves his dead sprawled across the footlights of the stage, like them he has succeeded in giving the public of his time a vision of the quickness, the romantic mutability of life which survives the subtle passion of decay.”²¹

Southern writer Roark Bradford once observed that Oxford was different from the rest of Mississippi because it had the advantage of the University of Mississippi,

an institution that has built a fine tradition of culture. The State of Mississippi has allocated to its other colleges the duties of teaching the technical trades that have swamped most centers of learning, and has kept “Ole Miss” remarkably free from the trade-school brand of education. In turn, the University has created a kind of erudite dignity which rises above the blatant, scheming, angle-figuring self-aggrandizement by which aggressive people are seeking life’s fulfillment. This influence has been felt in the town and surrounding country, and the effect of it on the unlettered poor whites often produces strange phenomena.²²

Certainly some of this influence was felt by the young Faulkner, granting him a kind of sophistication not found in real country boys and even most small-town boys. His late entry to and early departure from public education were more than compensated for by the influence of his bookish family. Faulkner grew up in a time when women such as those in his family possessed the leisure to read serious poetry and worthy novels, attend Browning Society meetings, organize “modern” book clubs, host reunions of Civil War veterans, and read frequently to their children and grandchildren. Even middle-class businessmen owned the collected works of well-known American, British, and French authors. Faulkner’s father, who was not university educated, read the mildly erotic novels of nineteenth-century French authors, as well as late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century westerns and humor.

As a university town Oxford was accessible by road and rail, so family members from other towns gathered there often to tell and retell stories of their forebears’ exploits. Faulkner told one of his Random House editors, “The South’s the place for a novelist to grow up because the folks there talk so much about the past. Why, when I was a little boy, there’d be sometimes twenty or thirty people in the house, mostly relatives, aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins, some maybe coming for overnight and staying on for months, swapping stories about the family and about the past, while I sat in a corner and listened. That’s where I got my books.”²³ The town’s opera house, which Faulkner’s paternal grandfather owned, staged professional theatrical and musical performances and presented lectures by notable speakers of the day, as did the university campus. The Falkner family attended and discussed these events. On the wide porches where one could obtain some relief from the summer heat in the evening, children overheard discussions of these performances and lectures in addition to family stories.

The Falkner family women, though they did not operate on the same stages as their husbands and fathers and committed no violent acts, were even more important than the men to Faulkner’s childhood and his early literary development through the experience of good books. As first child and first grand-child, he spent much time in his formative years in the company of family women, hearing their stories, observing their lives, and benefiting from their encouragement and care. They were, even more than the men, the keepers of culture, members of Oxford’s literary clubs who attended the local lectures, concerts, and dramatic performances.

Faulkner’s two grandmothers both died within six months of one another, when he was around ten years old. “Damuddy” died near Easter and Sallie Murry Falkner near Christmas. The conjunction of losses and Christian holidays left its mark on Faulkner’s memory. It set up the seminal event that opens The Sound and the Fury, in which the children are sent away from the house because of the death of their grandmother. The first two scenes of The Sound and the Fury leap from Easter to Christmas in the mind of the youngest child, the idiot Benjy, whose year of birth is the same as Faulkner’s.

Women outside the family were important teachers and influences, too. The copy of The Clansman that Faulkner’s first-grade teacher, Annie Chandler, gave him was still in his library when he died. Some years after he received this gift the dramatic version of Dixon’s inflammatory book about Reconstruction and the Ku Klux Klan played in his grandfather’s opera house, with real horses on stage, and the movie version, The Birth of a Nation, created a national furor that Faulkner could not have missed. When he became disaffected with school at the onset of adolescence, he also began to escape the influence of his mother and his Aunt Holland Falkner Wilkins, his father’s widowed sister who came to live with the Falkner family in 1904. When Dean came along in 1907, Faulkner also left the care of Callie Barr, his black nurse, and became the road companion of his grandfather and the Falkner chauffeur, Chester “Chess” Carothers, on their trips to outlying communities.

Faulkner complemented this second phase of his education, which took place mainly under the tutelage of men, with work at one of his father’s business ventures, a livery stable that Murry Falkner operated in Oxford just as the motor car appeared. As Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley, “I more or less grew up in my father’s livery stable. Being the eldest of four boys, I escaped my mother’s influence pretty easy, since my father thought it was fine for me to apprentice to the business. I imagine I would have been in the livery stable yet if it hadn’t been for motor car [sic].”²⁴ The livery stable, hunting and fishing trips with Carothers, and automobile rides to country hamlets with his grandfather or his Uncle John (John Wesley Thompson Falkner Jr.), brought him closer to the life of the county and town than he could ever have come by reading nineteenth-century books. A fictional version of his livery stable experience, a sketch titled “And Now What’s to Do” that Faulkner wrote in the mid 1920s, may embellish his memories even more than his remarks to Cowley:

His father loved horses better than books or learning; he owned a livery stable, and here the boy grew up, impregnated with the violent ammoniac odor of horses. At ten he could stand on a box and harness a horse … almost as quickly as a grown man … by the time he was twelve he had acquired from the negro hostlers an uncanny skill with a pair of dice…. Each Christmas eve his father carried a hamper full of whisky in pint bottles to the stable…. The boy, become adolescent, helped to drink this; old ladies smelled his breath at times and tried to save his soul.²⁵

Faulkner’s fictional portrait of his family in “And Now What’s to Do” may or may not be true, for by the time he wrote it he had learned from Anderson that personal fiction was made from the lives of everyone the writer knew and then embellished to make it more interesting. But the sketch is probably an accurate representation of Faulkner’s feelings when he was an adolescent, as he became more remote from his mother and self-conscious, even critical, about his father and grandfather. “And Now What’s to Do” records that the boy’s grandfather was “a deaf, upright man in white linen, who wasted his inherited substance in politics.”²⁶ About the father, the piece observes not only that he “loved horses better than books” but, more poignantly, that at sixteen the boy “began to acquire an inferiority complex regarding his father’s business,” because the girls and boys in school with him were the children of “lawyers and doctors and merchants—all genteel professions, with starched collars.”²⁷ The story also records that the boy learns to drink whiskey with the hostlers and grooms in his father’s livery stable. In one of Faulkner’s later statements about growing up he claimed that when, before World War I, he worked as a clerk in his grandfather’s bank, he drank surreptitiously from his grandfather’s whiskey. Whether these stories are literally true or precisely date Faulkner’s use (and abuse) of alcohol is not clear. They reflect other people’s stories about him indicating that he adopted the family weakness, particularly marked in his father, for making himself ill by overindulgence.

The writing in “And Now What’s to Do” is reminiscent of the work of Anderson, who came from a slightly lower social class than did Faulkner, but the depiction of adolescence is telling and rings true. And it was true that, like the grandfather in the sketch, Faulkner’s paternal grandfather was deaf and dabbled profitlessly in politics. In the Young Colonel it was increasingly obvious that the derring-do of Colonel William ’C. Falkner burned as eccentricity. Faulkner’s grandfather’s political connections made him an important man in both the area around Oxford and the rest of the state: early on he served as a state senator and later in life as a member of the University of Mississippi’s board of trustees. The Young Colonel let the family fortunes decline, though, instead of making them grow.

However difficult he may have been, Faulkner’s grandfather owned a library filled with books of high adventures from other times and other cultures. “The Big Place,” where Faulkner lived when his family moved to Oxford in 1902 and which he visited on a regular basis throughout his youth, remained a crucial memory for him in many ways. The library included the collected works of such well-known writers as Honorè de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas perè, and Sir Walter Scott, as well as an assortment of other authors. In the preface to The Faulkner Reader (1954) the author writes, “I realize now that I got most of my early education” in that “diffuse and catholic” family library.²⁸ Some of these works he reread when he matured, and he drew on them in his novels. The books of Balzac, Scott, and Dumas were in effect finer prose versions, from older European cultures, of the family and war stories Faulkner regularly heard.

Other books that were available to Faulkner also provide interesting analogues to the family stories he would have heard and even to the kind of boy’s life he lived in a small town. For instance, the adult Faulkner retained in his own library his grandfather’s copies of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-1848), Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857), and some of the works by Dumas and Scott that were his grandfather’s favorites. Faulkner also acquired books signed by his grandmother, Sallie Murry Falkner—notably, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance (1852), Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), and works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton; George Gordon, Lord Byron; and Victor Hugo. Faulkner recalled that when he stayed in his great-grandfather Murry’s house in Ripley on visits, he and his brothers were required to recite a substantial Bible verse in order to be served breakfast. This practice gave him a deep familiarity with the Old and New Testaments that became a rich vein of allusion and structure in his major novels.²⁹

Faulkner’s father, Murry, the oldest of the Young Colonel’s three children, fared less well in life than his father and earned no real or honorific titles. He is remembered in his son’s writing for his repeated failures in business and for his attempts to push his oldest son into remunerative work. But he is also acknowledged by Faulkner for his “unfailing kindness which supplied me with bread at need despite the outrage to his principles at having been of a bum progenitive.”³⁰ That is, Murry Falkner, though a stern father typical of his time who did not coddle his four sons, showed them love, took an interest in their lives, and supported them financially in various ways, no matter what they were doing. Faulkner lived most of his life at home with his parents until he married Estelle Oldham Franklin in 1929.

Faulkner’s father was a reader, too, and he shared books with his sons. His taste in books was somewhat different from that of Faulkner’s grandfather, though Murry Falkner also liked the adventurous and romantic. His youthful longing for cowboy life in the wild West expressed itself in a fondness for Wister’s The Virginian and Lin McLean (1898), his copies of which Faulkner retained throughout his life. Zane Grey became his favorite author. But Wister and Grey were not the only writers whose work he owned and signed. In Faulkner’s library as catalogued at the end of his life were his father’s copies of books by James Branch Cabell, James Feni-more Cooper, frontier humorist George Washington Harris, Balzac, Alphonse Daudet, Emile Zola, and Henrik Ibsen. These books, it seems clear, were acquired by Murry Falkner as a young man and were thus in the household well before the time the children began to read.

Other influential members of the Falkner family households who deserve mention in an account of family influence on Faulkner are the African Americans who worked for his parents and grandparents. Under almost any circumstances some of these people would have been conduits to stories about the days of slavery and the Civil War. To a child such as Faulkner they also provided a perspective on local culture quite different from that of his parents. He recorded in his 1912 letter to his parents how important were the intelligence, skills, and care of Chess Carothers, his grandfather’s driver. More fully and thoughtfully acknowledged in Faulkner’s later correspondence and writing was Callie Barr. At the age of about sixty, her own family raised and grown, Callie came to the Falkner household to help Maud Falkner raise her four children. She remained with the family off and on for most of the rest of her days, spending her last decade in a small house provided by Faulkner on the grounds of Rowan Oak. She died in 1940, almost one hundred years old. Following Callie’s wishes, when she succumbed to a stroke, Faulkner conducted a funeral service for her in the parlor of his house, with her family and his all present. He delivered a moving eulogy that he thought worth saving:

Caroline has known me all my life. It was my privilege to see her out of hers. After my father’s death [in 1932], to Mammy 1 came to represent the head of that family to which she had given a half century of fidelity and devotion. But the relationship between us never became that of master and servant. She still remained one of my earliest recollections, not only as a person, but as a fount of authority over my conduct and of security for my physical welfare…. She was an active and constant precept for decent behavior. From her I learned to tell the truth, to refrain from waste, to be considerate of the weak and respectful to age.

He closed the eulogy with a paraphrase of the epitaph he had once suggested for himself: “She was born and lived and served, and died and now is mourned; if there is a heaven, she has gone there.”³¹

Some ironies abound in Faulkner’s observation that from Callie he “learned to tell the truth,” but what he says about decent behavior and being considerate rings true. Faulkner’s presentations in his fiction of the courtesy of African American characters is based on what he learned at home. It does not require too much imagination to surmise that Callie was the inspiration for Dilsey, the Compson family maid in The Sound and the Fury, but the writer’s most profound tribute to Callie comes in Go Down, Moses, which is dedicated to her memory and in which the characterizations of both Molly Beauchamp and Sophonsiba “Fonsiba” Beauchamp owe something to her life. Some of Faulkner’s remarks in the 1940 eulogy document his acknowledgment of what, in such a charged racial climate, this small African American woman contributed to his evolving perceptions as a moral human being.

At the pinnacle of his success, on the platform in Sweden to receive the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, Faulkner spoke with a concern for humankind that many readers had not had the perception to see laced throughout his fiction. His work, which he called, “a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before,” had been undertaken so that he might be “listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail.” In the dawn of the atomic age, with the fear of unpredictable mass annihilation, “the basest of all things is to be afraid,” and he “labors under a curse” who does not understand the importance of “the old verities and truths of the human heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”³² These are the qualities Faulkner attributed to the idealism of the young. He perceived that the unsolved problems of youth are often visited upon adults who fail or refuse to grow up—the three Compson brothers in The Sound and the Fury, for example. Faulkner perceived, as well, that one of the most poignant subjects for fiction is the difficulty young people encounter when they try to carry their ideals, the values they have been taught, intact through the crucible of adolescence into an adult world where those values and ideals are too seldom honored.

AWARDS AND RECOGNITIONS

1939 Elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters

1948 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters

1950 Howells Medal for Fiction, American Academy of Arts and Letters

Nobel Prize in literature (1949 prize, awarded in 1950)

1951 National Book Award, for Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)

Medal of the French Legion d’Honneur

1955 Pulitzer Prize in literature, for A Fable (1954)

National Book Award, for A Fable

1957 Silver medal of the Greek Academy

1962 Gold Medal for Fiction, National Institute of Arts and Letters

NOTES

1. The second Falkner son, Murry Charles “Jack” Falkner, served as a Marine in World War I. He joined the FBI after the war and later served as a counterintelligence agent in World War II. He was stationed in Algiers, where he met and married a French ballet dancer. After the war Jack Falkner had a long career as special agent for the FBI that took him many places before he retired to Mobile, Alabama. His own deft memoir of the Falkner boys’ lives together is The Falkners of Mississippi (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967). The third son, John Wesley Thompson Falkner III, who also added the u to the spelling of his last name when he became an author, wrote several novels and a memoir of his own, My Brother Bill: An Affectionate Memoir (New York: Trident, 1963; reprinted, with a new foreword by John’s son Jimmy Faulkner, Athens, Ga.: Hill Street Press, 1998).

2. William Faulkner to Warren Beck, 6 July 1941, in Selected Letters of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph L. Blotner (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 142.

3. For Stone’s biography, and a portrait of Oxford, Mississippi, see Susan Snell, Phil Stone of Oxford: A Vicarious Life (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).

4. Faulkner, foreword to The Faulkner Reader (1954); reprinted in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, edited by James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1965), p. 180.

5. Faulkner, “Verse Old and Nascent: A Pilgrimage,” in William Faulkner: Early Prose and Poetry, edited by Carvel Collins (London: Cape, 1963), pp. 114, 117.

6. Faulkner to Maud Butler Faulkner, in Thinking of Home: William Faulkner’s Letters to His Mother and Father 1918-1925, edited by James G. Watson (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 63.

7. Lothar Hönnighausen surveys the late-nineteenth-century influences in Faulkner’s work, reproducing many illustrations, in William Faulkner: The Art of Stylization in his Early Graphic and Literary Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

8. Michel Gresset, A Faulkner Chronology (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985), p. 16.

9. Faulkner, “An Introduction for The Sound and the Fury,” edited by Meriwether, Southern Review, new series 8 (Autumn 1972): 705-710.

10. Michael Millgate, Faulkner’s Place (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), p. 95.

11. Richard P. Adams, “The Apprenticeship of William Faulkner,” Tulane Studies in English, 12 (1962): 113-114.

12. Recent accounts of Faulkner’s post office job make it clear that he and Stone hatched another one of their extravagant plans—like the British biography and recommendations for the RAF—to make sure that he lost his job without committing a felony or owing the federal government too much money. See Joan St. C. Crane, “’Case No. 133733-C: The Inspector’s Letter to Postmaster William Faulkner,” Mississippi Quarterly, 42 (Summer 1989): 229-245.

13. “Colloquies at Nagano Seminar,” in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926—1962, edited by Meriwether and Millgate (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 117.

14. Sherwood Anderson, “A Meeting South,” Dial (April 1925).

15. Faulkner to Maud Butler Falkner, in Thinking of Home, pp. 194-195.

16. Faulkner to Horace Liveright, 16 October 1927, in Selected Letters, p. 38.

17. Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, one-volume edition (New York: Random House, 1984), p. 240. This episode is not recounted in the two-volume first edition of Blotner’s biography, published in 1974, while Mrs. Faulkner was still alive.

18. Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 156.

19. Faulkner, “Mississippi,” in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, p. 13.

20. Sally Harrison, “New Faulkner Novel,” Brooklyn Citizen, 29 March 1940; reprinted in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews, edited by M. Thomas Inge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 209.

21. Horace Gregory, “In the Haunted, Heroic Land of Faulkner’s Imagination,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, 20 August 1950; reprinted in The Contemporary Reviews, p. 304.

22. Roark Bradford, “The Private World of William Faulkner,” in Conversations with William Faulkner, edited by Inge (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), p. 85. Bradford was the author of Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun (1928), a collection of Bible stories written in black dialect, and other stories and novels sentimentalizing African American life in the South. Ol’ Man Adam an’ His Chillun was the basis for Marc Connelly’s play The Green Pastures (1929).

23. Robert N. Linscott, “Faulkner without Fanfare,” in Conversations with William Faulkner, p. 101.

24. Faulkner to Malcolm Cowley, 8 December 1945, in Selected Letters, p. 212.

25. Faulkner, “And Now What’s to Do,” Mississippi Quarterly, 26 (Summer 1973): 399-400.

26. Ibid., p. 399.

27. Ibid., p. 400.

28. Faulkner, foreword to The Faulkner Reader (New York: Random House, 1954).

29. “Interview with Jean Stein vanden Heuvel,” in Lion in the Garden, p. 250.

30. Faulkner, Introduction to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary (1932); reprinted in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, p. 176.

31. Faulkner, “Funeral Sermon for Mammy Caroline Barr,” in Essays, Speeches& Public Letters, pp. 117, 118.

32. Faulkner, “Address Upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,” in Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, pp. 119, 120.