William Faulkne Biography

8/3/2019 William Faulkne Biography

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William Faulkner

The man himself never stood taller than five feet, six inches tall, but in the realmof American literature, William Faulkner is a giant. More than simply a renownedMississippi writer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and short story writer isacclaimed throughout the world as one of the twentieth centurys greatest writers,one who transformed his postage stamp of native soil into an apocryphal settingin which he explored, articulated, and challenged the old verities and truths of theheart. During what is generally considered his period of greatest artisticachievement, from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to Go Down, Moses in1942, Faulkner accomplished in a little over a decade more artistically than mostwriters accomplish over a lifetime of writing. It is one of the more remarkable featsof American literature, how a young man who never graduated from high school,never received a college degree, living in a small town in the poorest state in thenation, all the while balancing a growing family of dependents and impendingfinancial ruin, could during the Great Depression write a series of novels all set inthe same small Southern county novels that include As I Lay Dying, Light in

August, and above all, Absalom, Absalom! that would one day be recognized asamong the greatest novels ever written by an American.

The Early YearsWilliam Cuthbert Falkner (as his name was then spelled) was born on September 25,

1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons born to Murry and Maud ButlerFalkner. He was named after his great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, the OldColonel, who had been killed eight years earlier in a duel with his former business partnerin the streets of Ripley, Mississippi. A lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil Warcolonel, railroad financier, and finally a best-selling writer (of the novel The White Rose ofMemphis), the Old Colonel, even in death, loomed as a larger-than-life model of personaland professional success for his male descendants.

A few days before Williams fifth birthday, the Falkners moved to Oxford,


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Mississippi, at the urging of Murrys father, John Wesley Thompson Falkner. Called theYoung Colonel out of homage to his father rather than to actual military service, the

younger Falkner had abruptly decided to sell the railroad begun by his father.

Disappointed that he would not inherit the railroad, Murry took a series of jobs inOxford, most of them with the help of his father. The elder Falkner, meanwhile, foundedthe First National Bank of Oxford in 1910 with $30,000 in capital.

William demonstrated artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, butaround the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies. His earliestliterary efforts were romantic, conscientiously modeled on English poets such as Burns,Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne. While still in his youth, he also made theacquaintance of two individuals who would play an important role in his future: a childhood

sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone.Estelle was a popular, vivacious girl in Oxford with an active social life that included

dances and parties. Despite her romance with William, she dated other boys, one of whomwas Cornell Franklin, an Ole Miss law student who proposed marriage. Shelightheartedly accepted, apparently believing his request insincere since he was going toHawaii to establish a law practice. When he sent her an engagement ring several monthslater, however, her parents thought Franklin would be a fine husband for their daughter,and she found herself unable to escape the circumstances. She and Franklin were married

in Oxford on April 18, 1918.Williams other close acquaintance from this period arose from their mutual interest in

poetry. When Stone read the young poets work, he immediately recognized Williamstalent and set out to give Faulkner encouragement, advice, and models for study.

Like Franklin, Stone was a lawyer, schooled at Ole Miss and Yale. FollowingEstelles marriage, he invited Faulkner to stay with him in New Haven, where Faulknerfirst took a job with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company (where, for the first time,his name was spelled Faulkner in employee records, possibly the result of a typing error).

But his job did not last long, for in June he accepted an invitation to become a cadet intraining in the Royal Air Force in Canada.

Earlier, Faulkner had tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force, but he had beenturned down because of his height. In his RAF application, he lied aboutnumerous facts, including his birthdate and birthplace, in an attempt to pass himself


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as British. He also spelled his name Faulkner, believing it looked more British,and in meeting with RAF officials he affected a British accent.

He began training in Toronto, but before he finished training, the war ended.

He received an honorable discharge and bought an officers dress uniform and aset of wings for the breast pocket, even though he had probably never flown solo.

Though he had seen no combat in his wartime military service, upon returningto Oxford in December 1918, he allowed others to believe he had. He told manystories of his adventures in the RAF, most of which were highly exaggerated orpatently untrue, including injuries that had left him in constant pain and with a silverplate in his head. His brief service in the RAF would also serve him in his written

fiction, particularly in his first published novel, Soldiers Pay, in 1926.Back in Oxford, he first engaged in a footloose life, basking in the temporary

glory of a war veteran. In 1919, he enrolled at the University of Mississippi inOxford under a special provision for war veterans, even though he had nevergraduated from high school. In August, his first published poem, LApres-Mididun Faune [sic], appeared in The New Republic. While a student at Ole Miss,he published poems and short stories in the campus newspaper, the Mississippian,

and submitted artwork for the university yearbook. In the fall of 1920, Faulknerhelped found a dramatic club on campus called The Marionettes, for which hewrote a one-act play titled The Marionettes but which was never staged. Afterthree semesters of study at Ole Miss, he dropped out in November 1920. Overthe next few years, Faulkner wrote reviews, poems, and prose pieces for TheMississippian and worked several odd jobs. At the recommendation ofStarkYoung, a novelist in Oxford, in 1921 he took a job in New York City as an

assistant in a bookstore managed by Elizabeth Prall, who would later be the wifeof writer Sherwood Anderson. His most notorious job during this period was hisstint as postmaster in the university post office from the spring of 1922 toOctober 31, 1924. By all accounts, he was a terrible postmaster, spending muchof his time reading or playing cards with friends, misplacing or losing mail, and failing


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to serve customers. When a postal inspector came to investigate, he agreed toresign. During this period, he also served as a scoutmaster for the Oxford BoyScout troop, but he was asked to resign for moral reasons (probably drinking).

A Failed Poet

In 1924, his friend Phil Stone secured the publication of a volume ofFaulkners poetry, The Marble Faun, by the Four Seas Company. It waspublished in December 1924 in an edition of 1,000 copies, dedicated to hismother and with a preface by Stone.

In January 1925, Faulkner moved to New Orleans and fell in with a literarycrowd which included Sherwood Anderson (author of Winesburg, Ohio) andcentered around The Double Dealer, a literary magazine whose credits includethe first published works of Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert PennWarren, and Edmund Wilson. Faulkner published several essays and sketchesin The Double Dealer and in the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the latter wouldlater be collected under the title New Orleans Sketches. He wrote his firstnovel, Soldiers Pay, and on Andersons advice sent it to the publisher Horace

Liveright. After Liveright accepted the novel, Faulkner sailed from New Orleansto Europe, arriving in Italy on August 2. His principal residence during the nextseveral months was near Paris, France, just around the corner from theLuxembourg Gardens, where he spent much of his time; his written description ofthe gardens would later be revised for the closing of his novelSanctuary. While inFrance, he would sometimes go to the cafe that James Joyce would frequent, butthe interminably shy Faulkner never mustered the nerve to speak to him. After

visiting England, he returned to the United States in December.In February 1926, Soldiers Pay was published by Boni and Liveright in an

edition of 2,500 copies. Again in New Orleans, he began working on his secondnovel, Mosquitoes, a satirical novel with characters based closely upon his literarymilieu in New Orleans; set aboard a yacht in Lake Pontchartrain, the novel is


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today considered one of Faulkners weakest. For his third novel, however,Faulkner considered some advice Anderson had given him, that he should writeabout his native region. In doing so, he drew upon both regional geography and

family history (particularly his great-grandfathers Civil War and post-war exploits)to create Yocona County, later renamed Yoknapatawpha. In a 1956 interview,Faulkner described the liberating effect the creation of his fictional county had forhim as an artist: Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postagestamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enoughto exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into apocryphal I would have completeliberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top (Lion in theGarden 255).

Faulkner may have been excited by his latest achievement, but his publisherwas less thrilled: Liveright refused to publish the novel, which Faulkner hadtitled Flags in the Dust. Dejected, he began to shop the novel around to otherpublishers, with similar results. In the meantime, believing his career as a writer allbut over, he began to write a novel strictly for pleasure, with no regard, he said, forits eventual publication. As for the earlier novel, Faulkner solicited the help of hisfriend Ben Wasson, a literary agent in New York, who convinced Harcourt,Brace to publish the novel, but only with extensive cuts from the manuscript. Thepurged novel, trimmed by about a third, was published in January 1929 under thetitle Sartoris. (A restored version of the original Flags in the Dust would bepublished in 1973, more than ten years after Faulkners death.)

Contrary to his earlier opinion, the novel Faulkner had written strictly forpleasure was publishable, though he did have to convince his new publisher,Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith (formerly of Harcourt, Brace) not tointerfere with his manuscript. A revolutionary novel in style and content, it wasdivided into four discrete sections, the first three of which are told by brothers in asingle family. The first section is told by an idiot with no concept of time hisnarrative slips easily back and forth in time with no warning to the reader except fora usual brief shift to italic typeface. Individually, each section is revealing both


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stylistically and as an exploration of character; together, however, the four partsoperate to reveal the slow demise of a once-prominent southern family, which isdemonstrated most explicitly in the gradual decline and disappearance of the

brothers sister, Caddy Compson. Taking his title from a soliloquy inShakespeares Macbeth which refers to life as a tale told by an idiot, Faulknercalled the novel The Sound and the Fury.

After The Sound and the Fury was published in October 1929, Faulknerhad to turn his attention to making money. Earlier that year, he hadwritten Sanctuary, a novel which Faulkner later claimed in an introduction heconceived deliberately to make money. Because of its sordid subject the novel

was immediately turned down by the publisher. Faulkners need for incomestemmed largely from his growing family. In April, Estelle Oldham had divorcedCornell Franklin, and in June she and Faulkner were married at or near CollegeHill Presbyterian Church, just north of Oxford. Estelle brought to the marriagetwo children, Malcolm and Victoria, and after a honeymoon in Pascagoula, on theMississippi Gulf Coast, they lived at Miss Elma Meeks house in Oxford.Faulkner, now working nights at a power plant, wrote As I Lay Dying, laterclaiming it was a tour de force and that he had written it in six weeks, withoutchanging a word.

Though his hyperbolic claims about the novel were not entirely true, As I LayDying is nevertheless a masterfully written successor to The Sound and theFury. As with the earlier work, the novel focuses on a family and is told stream-of-conscious style by different narrators, but rather than an aristocratic family, thefocus here is on lower-class farm laborers from southern Yoknapatawpha County,the Bundrens, whose matriarch, Addie, has died and had asked to be buried inJefferson, a days hard ride away to the north. The journey to Jefferson isfraught with perils of fire and flood (from the rain-swollen Yoknapatawpha River)as well as the family members inner feelings of grief and loss. The novel would bepublished in October 1930.


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The year 1930 was significant to Faulkner for two other reasons as well, bothof which took place in April. First, he bought a decrepit antebellum house inOxford, which plunged him further into debt but in which he would find comfort and

pleasure for the rest of his life. Built originally in 1844 by a Robert Shegogg,Faulkner named the house Rowan Oak, after a Scottish legend alluding to theprotective powers of wood from the rowan tree. Also in April, Faulkner saw thefirst national publication of a short story he had written, A Rose for Emily,in Forum magazine. It would be followed that year by Honor in AmericanMercury, Thrift, and Red Leaves, both in the Saturday Evening Post. Overthe coming years, as sales of his novels sagged, he would write numerous shortstories for publication, especially in the Saturday Evening Post, as a principalmeans of financial support.

That same year, his publisher had a change of heart aboutpublishing Sanctuary and sent galley proofs to Faulkner for proofreading, butFaulkner decided, at considerable personal expense, to drastically revise the novel.The novel, which features the rape and kidnaping of an Ole Miss coed, TempleDrake, by a sinister bootlegger named Popeye, shocked and horrified readers,particularly in Oxford; published in February 1931, Sanctuary would beFaulkners best-selling novel until The Wild Palms was published in 1939.

In January 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama. The child, bornprematurely, would live only a few days. Faulkners first collection of shortstories, These 13, would be published in September and dedicated to Estelleand Alabama.

Soon after Alabamas death, Faulkner began writing a novel tentatively

titled Dark House, which would feature a man of uncertain racial lineage who, asan orphaned child, was named Joe Christmas. In this, Faulkners first majorexploration of race, he examines the lives of outcasts in Yoknapatawpha County,including Joanna Burden, the granddaughter and sister of civil rights activistsgunned down in the town square; the Rev. Gail Hightower, so caught up in family


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pride and heritage that he ignores his own wifes decline into infidelity and eventualsuicide; and Lena Grove, a (literally) barefoot and pregnant girl from Alabamawhose journey to find the father of her child both opens and closes the novel. At

the center of the novel is the orphan, the enigmatic Joe Christmas, who defieseasy categorization into either race, white or black. The novel would be publishedas Light in August in October 1932 by his new publisher of Harrison Smith andRobert Haas.

The year 1932 would mark the beginning of a new sometime profession forFaulkner, as screenwriter in Hollywood. During an extended trip to New YorkCity the previous year, he had made a number of important contacts in Hollywood,

including actress Tallulah Bankhead. In April 1932, Faulkner signed a six-weekcontract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and in May Faulkner initiated what wouldbe the first of many stints as screenwriter in Hollywood. In July, Faulkner metdirector Howard Hawks, with whom he shared a common passion for flying andhunting. Of the six screenplays for which Faulkner would receive on-screen credit,five would be for films directed by Hawks, the first of which was Today WeLive (1933), based on Faulkners short story Turn About.

Faulkner returned to Oxford in August after the sudden death of his father.With the addition of his mother to his growing number of dependents, Faulknerneeded money. He returned to Hollywood in October with his mother andyounger brother Dean, and sold Paramount the rights to film Sanctuary. The film,retitled The Story of Temple Drake, opened in May 1933, one month after theMemphis premiere of Today We Live which Faulkner attended. That spring alsosaw the publication of A Green Bough, Faulkners second and last collection ofpoetry.

Faulkners MGM contract expired in May 1933, and with his temporarywindfall he purchased a Waco-210 monoplane. In June, Estelle gave birth toFaulkners only surviving daughter, Jill. The following winter, Faulkner wrote to hispublisher that he was working on a new novel whose working title, like Light in


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August before, was Dark House. Roughly, he wrote, the theme is a man whooutraged the land, and the land then turned and destroyed the mans family.Quentin Compson, of the Sound & Fury, tells it, or ties it together; he is the

protagonist so that it is not complete apocrypha.In April 1934, Faulkner published a second collection of stories, Doctor

Martino and Other Stories. That spring, he began a series of Civil War storiesto be sold to The Saturday Evening Post. Faulkner would later revise and collectthem together to form the novel The Unvanquished (1938). In March 1935, hepublished the non-Yoknapatawpha novel Pylon, which was inspired apparently bythe death of Captain Merle Nelson during an air show on February 14, 1934, at

the inauguration of an airport in New Orleans. A few months later, in November,his brother Dean was killed in a crash of the Waco which Faulkner had given him.Married only a month before to Louise Hale, Dean would be survived by adaughter (to be born in March 1936), who would be named Dean after her father.Faulkner would take complete responsibility for the education of his niece.

In December, Faulkner began another tour of duty in Hollywood workingwith Hawks, this time at 20th Century-Fox, where he met Meta Carpenter,

Hawks secretary and script girl, with whom Faulkner would have an affair. Latethat month, Faulkner and collaborator Joel Sayre completed a screenplay for thefilm The Road to Glory, which would premiere in June 1936.

Back in Oxford in January 1936, Faulkner spent what would be the first ofmany stays at Wrights Sanatarium, a nursing home facility in Byhalia, Mississippi,where Faulkner would go to recover from his drinking binges. Not an alcoholic in aclinical sense, Faulkner nevertheless would sometimes go on extended drinking

binges, oftentimes at the conclusion of a writing project; on occasion, he wouldeven plan when to begin and end such binges. The January binge came on as hefinished the manuscript of what he had first called Dark House. At the center ofthe novel is the character of Thomas Sutpen, a mysterious figure who in 1833 hadcome to Yoknapatawpha County, bought a hundred square miles of virgin


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timberland, and set out to create a vast design of wealth, power, and progeny inthe form of white, male heirs. Set in the present day of 1909-1910, the novelshistorical past is largely narrated by four characters: Rosa Coldfield, Sutpens

sister-in-law, who regarded him as demonic; Jason Compson, a nihilist and fatalistand alcoholic father of Quentin; Quentin Compson, formerly of The Sound andthe Fury, and his Harvard roommate, Shreve McCannon, who together try topiece together the discordant fabric of the story of Thomas Sutpen, who hadbeen killed more than forty years earlier. In addition to its focus on family, race, andhistory, the novels narrative structure also confronts the key issue of readingitself, how readers interpret evidence and construct narratives from it. The novelwould be published in October 1936 by the new publisher Random House, whichhad bought out Smith and Haas. Faulkners new title for the book, alluding toKing Davids lament over his dead son in the Old Testament, was Absalom,Absalom!

Faulkner spent much of 1936 and the first eight months of 1937 inHollywood, again working for 20th Century-Fox, receiving on-screen writingcredit for Slave Ship (1937) and contributing to the story for Gunga Din (1939).In April, his mistress, Meta Carpenter, married Wolfgang Rebner and went withhim to Germany. Back at Rowan Oak in September, Faulkner began working ona new novel, which would consist of two short novellas with two completely separatecasts of characters appearing alternately throughout the book. Faulkners title forthe book was If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, consisting of the novellas The WildPalms and Old Man.

In the winter of 1937-1938, Faulkner bought Baileys Woods, a woodedarea adjacent to Rowan Oak, and Greenfield Farm, located seventeen miles fromOxford, which he would turn over to his brotherJohn to manage. In February1938, Random House published The Unvanquished, a novel consisting of sevenstories, six of which had originally appeared in an earlier form in The SaturdayEvening Post. A kind of prequel to Faulkners first Yoknapatawpha novel, TheUnvanquished tells the earlier history of the Sartoris family during and


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immediately after the Civil War, focusing especially on Bayard Sartoris, son ofthe legendary Colonel John Sartoris who, like Faulkners real-life great-grandfather, was gunned down in the street by a former business partner.

While in New York in the fall of 1938, Faulkner began writing a short story,Barn Burning, which would be published inHarpers the following year. ButFaulkner was not finished with the story. He had in mind a trilogy about theSnopes family, a lower-class rural laboring white family who, unlike the Compsonsand Sartorises of other Faulkner novels, had little regard for southern tradition,heritage, or lineage. The Snopes, often regarded as Faulkners metaphor for therising redneck middle class in the South, more interested in avaricious commercial

gain than honor or pride, were to be led in the trilogy by the enterprising FlemSnopes, who in the original story Barn Burning had appeared only briefly asthe eldest son of Ab Snopes.

In January 1939, Faulkner was elected to the National Institute of Arts andLetters. That same month, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem was published under thetitle The Wild Palms. In April 1940, the first book of the Snopes trilogy, TheHamlet, was published by Random House. Featuring a reworked version of Barn

Burning and other stories Faulkner had published, including Spotted Horses,the novel follows Flem Snopes from being the poor son of a barn-burningsharecropper to his securing a storekeepers job, as fire insurance, in the hamletof Frenchmans Bend (in southeastern Yoknapatawpha County). As Flem risesin stature and responsibility, and all the while bringing more and more Snopesesinto the community, thus further elevating himself personally and financially, heeventually agrees to marry the store owners daughter, Eula Varner, who ispregnant by another man.

Throughout 1941, Faulkner spent much of his time writing and reworkingstories into an episodic novel about the McCaslin family, several members of whomhad appeared briefly in The Unvanquished. Though several stories that wouldcomprise Go Down, Moses had been published separately, Faulkner revised


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extensively the parts that would comprise the novel, which spans more than 100years in the history of Yoknapatawpha County. At the physical andpsychological center of the book is The Bear, a hunting story that encompasses

both the fading wilderness, Native American issues of land ownership andenvironmental stewardship, and the problems of miscegenation compounded byincest. The book was published in May 1942 as Go Down, Moses and OtherStories, but in subsequent editions, Faulkner had the phrase and other storiesomitted, insisting to his publisher that the book was a novel.

Sale of his novels, meanwhile, had slumped, so he returned to California in July1942 to begin another stint at screen writing, this time for Warner Brothers, who

insisted he sign for seven years, which he was told was only a formality. His salarywas less than what he had earned as a novice at MGM ten years earlier. Thefollowing year, he began to work intermittently on A Fable, a novel whose plotwould revolve around a reincarnation of Christ during the First World War. Itwould take him more than ten years to complete it. Also in 1943, he was assignedto write the screenplay for Hemingways novel To Have and Have Not, butbecause of an extended vacation, he did not begin work on it until February 1944.

The movie, the first film to feature Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall togetheron screen, would premiere in January 1945. In August 1944, Faulkner beganwriting a screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandlers detective novel The BigSleep. It would premiere, also starring Bogart and Bacall, in August 1946.During this period, Faulkner also collaborated with Jean Renoir on his film TheSoutherner, but with no screen credit since it would violate his Warner Brotherscontract. It would premiere in August 1945. The three films together would

represent the pinnacle of Faulkners screen writing career. Nobel LaureateIn 1944, Faulkner began a correspondence with Malcolm Cowley, who at the

time was editing The Portable Hemingway for Viking Press. Cowley had in mind asimilar collection for Faulkner, whose novels by this time were effectively out of


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print. Though Faulkners reputation remained high in Europe, especially inFrance, where Jean-Paul Sartre allegedly said, For the young people in France,Faulkner is a god, in America the public had largely ceased to read his work.

Cowleys collection begins with an introductory biographical and critical essay, inwhich Faulkner had to correct for the first time some of the misconceptions of hiswar record. The collection itself consists of stories and novel passages that relate,in roughly chronological order, the saga of Yoknapatawpha County. For thebook, Faulkner contributed a new Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, inwhich he examined both the distant past and the near future of the Compsonfamily as told in the novel. Published in April 1946, The Portable Faulkner wouldmark the beginning of the resurgence in popular and critical interest in Faulknerswork. In December, the Modern Library would publish a one-volume editionof The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, preceded by FaulknersCompson Appendix. Over the coming years, the Modern Library wouldcontinue to re-issue Faulkners novels, a practice that continues to this day.

In March 1947, while continuing to work on his Christ fable, he wrote lettersto the Oxford newspaper to support the preservation of the old courthouse onthe town square, which some townspeople had proposed demolishing to build alarger one. In April, he agreed to meet in question-and-answer sessions withEnglish classes at the University of Mississippi, but he invited controversy whenhis candid statement about Hemingway he has no courage, has never climbedout on a limb ... has never used a word where the reader might check his usage by adictionary was included in a press release about the sessions. WhenHemingway read the remarks, he was hurt, moved even to write a letter answeringthe charge that he lacked courage, but when it grew too long, he asked a friend,

Brigadier General C.T. Lanham to write and tell Faulkner only what he knewabout Hemingways heroism as a war correspondent. Almost immediately,Faulkner replied, apologizing for the misunderstanding and pain caused by hisremarks, explaining that it was a garbled, incomplete version of what he had said,but he defended his comment by saying that it referred only to Hemingways


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craftsmanship as a writer and told how he was judging the quality of writing on itsdegree of failures, that Hemingway was next to last because he didnt have thecourage to risk bad taste, over-writing, dullness, etc. He wrote Hemingway also,

including a copy of the letter to Lanham, again apologizing and saying, I hope itwont matter a damn to you. But if or whe[ne]ver it does, please accept anothersquirm from yours truly.

In January 1948, Faulkner put aside A Fable to write a novel he considered adetective story. The central character is Lucas Beauchamp, who had appeared asa key descendant of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in Go Down,Moses, upon whose name his own was based. In the novel Beauchamp is accused

of murdering a white man and must rely upon the wits of a teenage boy, ChickMallison, to clear his name before the lynch mob arrives to do its job. In July,MGM purchased the film rights to the novel, and in October, Intruder in theDust was published. In the spring of 1949, director Clarence Brown and a filmcrew descended upon Oxford, Mississippi, to film the novel on location, and whilethe townspeople eagerly welcomed the filmmakers, even playing a number of extraand minor roles in the film, Faulkner was very reluctant to participate, though hemay have helped to rework the final scene. In October 1949, the world premiere ofBrowns Intruder in the Dust took place at the Lyric Theatre in Oxford.Faulkner attended at the insistence of his Aunt Alabama McLean.

In November, Faulkner published Knights Gambit, a collection of detectivestories including Tomorrow, Smoke, and the title novella. That same month, inStockholm, fifteen of the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy voted toaward the Nobel Prize for literature to Faulkner, but since a unanimous vote wasrequired, the awarding of the prize was delayed by a year.

In the summer of 1949, Faulkner had met Joan Williams, a young student andauthor of a prize-winning story. In 1950, he began a collaboration with heron Requiem for a Nun, a part-prose, part-play sequel to Sanctuary in whichnursemaid Nancy Mannigoe is sentenced to hang for the murder of Temple


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Drakes infant daughter. Temple, now married to Gowan Stevens, tries toconvince her husbands uncle, lawyer Gavin Stevens, to save Nancy fromexecution. In narrative prose sections preceding each of the plays three acts,

Faulkner details some of the early history of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County,and the state of Mississippi. His collaboration with Williams would eventually growinto a love affair.

In June 1950, Faulkner was awarded the Howells Medal for distinguishedwork in American fiction. In August, he publishedCollected Stories, the third andlast collection of stories published by Faulkner. It includes forty-two of the forty-six stories published in magazines since 1930, excluding those which he had

published or incorporated into The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, Go Down,Moses, and Knights Gambit. Two months later, Faulkner received word that theSwedish Academy had voted to award him and Bertrand Russell as corecipientsof the Nobel Prize for literature, Russell for 1950 and Faulkner for the previousyear. At first he refused to go to Stockholm to receive the award, but pressuredby the U.S. State Department, the Swedish Ambassador to the UnitedStates, and finally by his own family, he agreed to go.

On December 10, he delivered his acceptance speech to the academy in avoice so low and rapid that few could make out what he was saying, but when hiswords were published in the newspaper the following day, it was recognized for itsbrilliance; in later years, Faulkners speech would be lauded as the best speechever given at a Nobel ceremony. In it, Faulkner alluded to the impending Cold Warand the constant fear, a general and universal physical fear, whose consequencewas to make the young man or woman writing today [forget] the problems of thehuman heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because onlythat is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. The artist, Faulknersaid, must re-learn the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truthslacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed love and honor and pity andpride and compassion and sacrifice. He concludes on an optimistic note: I declineto accept the end of man.... I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.


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He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice,but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice andendurance. The poets, the writers duty is to write about thesethings.... The

poets voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, thepillars to help him endure and prevail.

At Howard Hawks request, Faulkner returned to Hollywood one last time inFebruary 1951 to rework a script titled The Left Hand of God for 20thCentury-Fox. The following month, he was awarded the National Book Awardfor Collected Stories, and in May, shortly after having delivered thecommencement address at his daughters high school graduation ceremony, French

President Vincent Auriol bestowed the award of Legion of Honor uponFaulkner. As he completed the writing and revision of Requiem for a Nun, hereceived several offers to stage the play, both in the United States and in France,but problems of financing prevented any full productions. The book was publishedin September 1951.

In April 1952, Faulkner attended the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle ofShiloh with fellow Mississippian Shelby Foote, whom Faulkner had met in 1941

when Foote had accompanied Faulkners agent, Ben Wasson, on a visit to RowanOak. In May he accepted an invitation to attend the Festival Oeuvres du XXeSicle in France; while abroad, he also visited England and Norway. Back athome in June, he resumed his relationship with Joan Williams and continuedworking on A Fable with more and more difficulty. When the intricate plot becametoo complex for him to keep track of, he wrote outlines of key events in the storysseven days on the walls of his office at Rowan Oak. Suffering from acute backpain, Faulkner was hospitalized twice, in September and October. In November,Faulkner agreed to participate in a short documentary film financed by the FordFoundation. Essentially re-enacting his own life, Faulkner is depicted at his farm,talking with townspeople on the streets of Oxford, and being cajoled into aninterview by Oxford Eagle editor Phil Mullen at Rowan Oak, during which


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Faulkner says (on camera), Okay, but no pictures. The film was broadcast onCBS-TVs program Omnibus.

While in New York in January 1953, he adapted his story The Brooch for

television while also working on A Fable and suffering bouts of back pain andalcoholism that required hospitalization. In March he was again hospitalized. Thefollowing month, Estelle suffered a hemorrhage and heart attack, so Faulknerreturned to Oxford. He returned to New York in May, where he met DylanThomas and e.e. cummings. In June, he delivered an address to Jills graduatingclass at Pine Manor Junior College. Following another hospitalization inSeptember, Faulkner was horrified to find his sacrosanct privacy invaded by the

publication of a two-part biographical article by Robert Coughlan in Septemberand Octobers issues of Life magazine.

In November, Albert Camus agent wrote Faulkner requesting permission toadapt Requiem for a Nun for the stage, to which Faulkner agreed. At the end ofthe month, he traveled to Egypt to assist Howard Hawks in the filming of Land ofthe Pharaohs, their last collaboration. For the next several months, he traveledthroughout Europe. He met Jean Stein in St. Moritz, Switzerland, on

December 25, and after visits to England and Paris joined Hawks, HumphreyBogart and Lauren Bacall in Rome on January 19. In March, he received a letterfrom Jill, who wrote that she had met Paul D. Summers, a lieutenant at WestPoint, whom she would like to marry, and asked Faulkner to come home. Hereturned to Oxford at the end of April 1954, after a six-month absence. Thatsame month saw the publication of Mississippi, a mostly nonfiction articlemingling history, his childhood, and his own work against the backdrop of his nativestate, in Holiday magazine; and The Faulkner Reader, an anthology whichincludes the complete text of The Sound and the Fury, three additional longstories (or novellas) The Bear from Go Down, Moses, Old Manfrom The Wild Palms, and Spotted Horses from The Hamlet as well asseveral other stories and novel excerpts. The three novellas would in 1958 bepublished together under the title Three Famous Short Novels. In August, after


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more than ten years of work, Faulkner finally published A Fable, dedicating it toJill and Estelle. Later that month, Jill and Paul Summers were married in Oxford.

Statesman to the WorldAt the end of June 1954, Faulkner had accepted an invitation from the U.S.

State Department to attend an international writers conference in So Paulo inAugust. Now an internationally known public figure, Faulkner no longer refused toappear in public in his own nation, and he usually accepted the increasing requestsby the State Department to attend cultural events abroad. In addition, he alsobegan to take a public stand as a moderate, if not liberal, southerner in the growing

debate over school integration.Though A Fable is generally considered one of Faulkners weaker novels, in

January 1955, it earned the National Book Award for Fiction and in May aPulitzer Prize in fiction. In August, Faulkner began a three-month, seven-nationgoodwill tour at the request of the State Department, traveling first to Japan,where at Nagano he participated in a seminar whose proceedings, along with twospeeches he had delivered, were published as Faulkner at Nagano. He left Japan

for Manila and then Italy, where from Rome he wrote a dispatch condemning themurder of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago who had been killed inMississippi. From Italy he went to Munich, where Requiem for a Nun was playing,and then to Paris for two weeks. In October, he left for London and then forReykjavik, Iceland, where once again he attended a program of conferences andinterviews. Finally he returned to the United States in October, during whichmonth Random House published Big Woods: The Hunting Stories, a collection

of four previously published stories about hunting with five interchapters at thebeginning and end of the book and between chapters to set or change the mood.He dedicated the book to his editor at Random House, Saxe Commins.

In November, Faulkner condemned segregation in an address before theSouthern Historical Association in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where


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because of segregation much effort was needed for blacks to be admitted. Thespeech was published in the Memphis Commercial Appeal under the headline Amixed audience hears Faulkner condemn the shame of segregation. Though

Faulkner opposed segregation, however, he opposed federal involvement in theissue, which resulted in his being understood by neither southern conservatives nornorthern liberals. Faulkners increasingly vocal stand on the issues of race drew firefrom his fellow southerners, including anonymous threats and rejection by his ownbrother,John. Misunderstanding over Faulkners views increased when in aFebruary 1956 interview with a London Sunday Times correspondent he wasquoted as saying that he would fight for Mississippi against the United States,even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes. Faulkner tried tocorrect the absurd statement in letters to three national magazines that hadrepeated the initial assertion, but the statements harm could not easily be undone.Two weeks after Life published Faulkners A Letter to the North, in which hepleaded for moderation, warning that one should not expect too much of theSouth, he had to be hospitalized for nine days after vomiting blood and collapsinginto unconsciousness. While he was in the hospital, Faulkners first grandchild,Paul, was born in Charlottesville, Virginia. Soon after, Faulkner would agree tobecome writer-in-residence at theUniversity of Virginia in Charlottesville for aperiod of eight to ten weeks every year.

In April 1956, black civil rights legend W.E.B. Du Bois challenged Faulknerto a debate on integration on the steps of the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi,where the accused in the Emmett Till murder trial had been acquitted by an all-white jury. Faulkner declined in a telegram, stating I do not believe there is adebatable point between us. We both agree in advance that the position you will

take is right morally, legally, and ethically. If it is not evident to you that the positionI take in asking for moderation and patience is right practically then we will bothwaste our breath in debate.

In September, Camus adaptation of Requiem for a Nun premiered at theThtre des Mathurins. That same month, Faulkner became involved in the


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Eisenhower administrations People-to-People Program, the aim of which was topromote American culture behind the Iron Curtain. At the end of September asteering committee consisting of Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Donald Hall

drew up several resolutions, including one supporting the liberation of EzraPound, but Faulkner would withdraw from the committee three months later.

From February to June 1957, Faulkner was writer-in-residence at theUniversity of Virginia and agreed to a number of question-and-answer sessionswith the students, faculty, and faculty spouses. Highlights of the taped sessionswould be published in 1959 by Professors Joseph Blotner and Frederick Gwynnunder the title Faulkner in the University. In March, while visiting Greece during a

leave of absence from Virginia, he received the Silver Medal of the AthensAcademy as one chosen by the Greek Academy to represent the principle thatman shall be free. Back in Charlottesville, in April he signed a contract withproducer Jerry Wald for an option on The Hamlet. The film, made by Martin Rittand starring Orson Welles, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward (their first on-screen pairing), would be released in 1958 under the title The Long Hot Summer.

In May 1957 Faulkner published The Town, the second volume of the

Snopes trilogy. Picking up where The Hamletleft off, it depicts Flem Snopesruthless struggle to take over the town of Jefferson. Now dividing his timebetween Oxford and Charlottesville, from February to May 1958 he fulfilled hissecond term as writer-in-residence at Virginia. Also while living in Virginia, hebegan to relish fox-hunting, and he was invited to join the Farmington Hunt Club,an achievement he displayed proudly by posing for photographs and portraits inhis pink membership coat. In December, Jills second son, William, was born, andthe following month saw the premiere of Requiem for a Nun on stage at the JohnGolden Theater in New York, making the United States the thirteenth nation inwhich the play had been produced.

In March 1959, Faulkner broke his collarbone in a fall from a horse atFarmington, a kind of accident that would continue to plague Faulkner for the


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remaining years of his life. In June, he transferred his manuscripts and typescriptsfrom the Princeton University Library to the Alderman Library at the Universityof Virginia. That month, the New York Times reported he had bought a house in

Charlottesville, though he would continue to live part of the year in Oxford. InNovember, The Mansion, the third and final volume of the Snopes trilogy, waspublished.

Throughout 1960, Faulkner continued to divide his time between Oxford andCharlottesville. On October 16, Faulkners mother, Maud Butler Falkner, diedat the age of 88. A talented painter who had completed nearly 600 paintings after1941, she had remained close to her eldest son throughout her life.

In January 1961, Faulkner willed all his manuscripts to the William FaulknerFoundation at the University of Virginia. In February, he accepted an invitationfrom General William Westmoreland to visit the military academy at West Point. InApril, Faulkner went on a final trip abroad for the State Department, this time toVenezuela, where he was the guest of President Rmulo Betancourt. He spentthe summer in Oxford, where in August he completed the manuscript for hisnineteenth and final novel. Titled The Reivers, an archaic Scottish spelling of an

old term for thieves, the novel is a light-hearted romp set at the turn of thecentury in which Boon Hogganbeck takes eleven-year-old Lucius Loosh Priestand a stowaway, Ned McCaslin, the Priest familys black coachman, on a joyrideto a Memphis brothel in Looshs grandfathers Winton Flyer automobile whileBoss Priest is away at a funeral. Amid the picaresque novels ludicrous anduproarious antics, which include Neds trading Boss Priests automobile for aracehorse named Lightning, are the serious issues of a childs initiation into moraladulthood and his realization of evil and injustice. Beginning the novel, subtitledA Reminiscence, with the phrase Grandfather said, Faulkner dedicated thenovel to Victoria, Mark, Paul, William, Burks, his grandchildren by his two step-children and biological daughter. The novel, published in June 1962, wouldposthumously earn for Faulkner his second Pulitzer Prize for fiction.


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In January of that year, Faulkner suffered another fall from a horse, forcingyet another hospital stay. In April, he again visited West Point with his wife,daughter, and son-in-law, and the following month in New York, fellow Mississippi

writerEudora Welty presented Faulkner with the Gold Medal for Fictionawarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

On June 17, Faulkner was again injured by a fall from a horse. In constantpain now, he signaled something was wrong when he asked on July 5 to be taken toWrights Sanatarium in Byhalia. Though he had been a patient there many times,he had always been taken there before against his will. His nephew, Jimmy, andEstelle accompanied him on the 65-mile trip to Byhalia, where he was admitted at

6 p.m. Less than eight hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. on July 6, 1962 the OldColonels birthday his heart stopped, and though the doctor on duty appliedexternal heart massage for forty-five minutes, he could not resuscitate him. WilliamFaulkner was dead of a heart attack at the age of 64.

He was buried on July 7 at St. Peters Cemetery in Oxford. As calls ofcondolence came upon the family from around the world and the press includingnovelist William Styron, who covered the funeral for Life magazine clamored for

answers to their questions from family members, a family representative relayed tothem a message from the family: Until hes buried he belongs to the family. Afterthat, he belongs to the world.A Rose for Emily Questions

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1. Why does Tobe stay with Emily?2. Why does Emily stay in Jefferson.3. If Emily's father only left her the house, how are her bills and food and things being paid for?4. What are some of the different thingsinherited in the story?

5. Did you find this story depressing? Uplifting? Disgusting? What is your overall reaction to thestory?

6. Do you find "A Rose for Emily" hard to read? If so, what parts are difficult? If not, what makes itaccessible for you?

7. What do you think happened to Miss Emily's house after the townspeople find the body? Do youthink the town made Homer's death a matter of record?

8. Is it significant that Emily is the last Grierson? Why or why not?

Documents

William Faulkne Biography