who was william faulkner?
Nobel Laureate and master of the Southern Gothic
Who was William Faulkner?
William Faulkner was an American author and Nobel Laureate awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949. Faulkner is known for his use of stream-of-consciousness narration, unreliable narrators, and nonlinear chronologies. He is also renowned for his world-building skills: Faulkner set most of his novels and stories in the fictional Yoknapatwapha County, and many of his writings feature a cast of interconnected and recurring characters. Faulkner is considered particularly central to the development of Southern (especially Southern Gothic) literature; having grown up in Mississippi, he set most of his writing in that region while exploring themes of history and memory, regional identity, and destitution and decay. Some William Faulkner quotes have become quite famous, such as “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Faulkner’s Biography and Historical Context
Early Life and Education
Faulkner was born in 1897 in Mississippi; his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, when he was very young, and Faulkner lived there for most of his life. Faulkner was initially interested in writing poetry and did not explore fiction until later in his life.
William Faulkner’s education included studying briefly at the University of Mississippi, but he never completed a degree. He began publishing fiction in the 1920s (his first novel, Soldiers Pay, was published in 1926). Initially, Faulkner tried writing about World War I, but for his third novel, (published in 1929 as Sartoris, later Flags in the Dust), Faulkner began exploring Southern history. This was also the first novel he set in Yoknapatwapha County.
Throughout the 1930s, Faulkner continued writing novels, developing his trademark innovative prose style, and also worked on short stories and screenwriting. Faulkner was influenced by both American and European Modernism, although he chose to remain living in America at a time when many prominent writers and intellectuals congregated in European cities.
The Southern Context: Faulkner’s Mississippi
The American Civil War spanned 1861 to 1865 and consisted of a military conflict between a group of Northern states (the Union) and a group of Southern states (the Confederacy). While the causes were complex, a primary source of the conflict was whether slavery should be expanded into western states. The war ended with a Union victory, and slavery was abolished in America.
After the end of the Civil War, the Southern states entered a period known as Reconstruction. Though the era was intended to reintegrate the South into the US and secure the freedom and opportunities of newly emancipated African Americans, racism remained rife and soon led to a segregationist backlash. Moreover, the South remained less industrialized and more rural than many other regions of America.
Faulkner was born in 1897, about 30 years after the end of the Civil War. He lived the majority of his life in Mississippi and grew up very interested in family stories from older generations who had lived during the Civil War. Faulkner set almost all of his fiction in Mississippi and returned over and over to themes about the power of the past and how it can stifle progress and growth, leaving individuals and entire communities subject to decay and decline.
William Faulkner’s famous works often depict complex and traumatic family dynamics, using the decline of specific Southern families to allegorize the South’s stagnation and corruption. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner depicts the deterioration of the Compson family (members of this family also appear in other novels). The novel reveals that changing times are leading to new levels of freedom and agency for groups such as women and Black people, causing friction with the white, patriarchal values that dominated the Old South.
Faulkner also repeatedly and unflinchingly explored slavery’s legacy, showing how racism and segregation were deeply embedded in Southern culture and resulted in dehumanization and tragedy. The plot of Intruder in the Dust revolves around a Black man being falsely accused of murdering a white man. It is eventually revealed that the murder victim was killed by his own brother, who assumed that the primarily white community would react viscerally to the possibility of a Black man murdering a white man and readily punish the wrong suspect. This plotline is one example of Faulkner’s engagement with themes of race, prejudice, hate, and justice playing out in the Southern United States.
Later Years and Legacy
William Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 in recognition of his contributions to the American novel. Faulkner was largely uncomfortable with fame and focused on using his literary stature to advance causes that were important to him. He used much of the prize money to establish the William Faulkner Foundation, which supports charitable causes related to education and literature. Faulkner also won the Pulitzer Prize twice (making him one of only four writers to date to receive multiple Pulitzers): in 1954, for his novel A Fable, and in 1963 for his final novel, The Reivers (published the previous year).
Given that many of Faulkner’s characters die violent and unusual deaths, readers may wonder, “How did William Faulkner die?” William Faulkner’s cause of death was complications from an injury resulting from a fall while horseback riding in June 1962. He died on July 6, 1963. Rowan Oak, the house and estate where Faulkner lived, was eventually sold to the University of Mississippi and has been preserved. The University of Virginia Southeast Missouri State University both hold significant collections of first editions, letters, manuscripts, and other materials related to Faulkner’s life and times.
Major Works: Faulkner’s Literary Canon
Overview of William Faulkner’s Most Famous Works
Many of William Faulkner’s novels and stories have become well-known and celebrated as important works of literature. Light in August, Faulkner’s seventh novel, was published in 1932; it describes the intertwined experiences of a cast of characters in a small Southern town, including a young pregnant woman searching for the man who fathered her illegitimate child and a biracial man navigating questions of alienation and identity. Through dramatic and eventually violent plot events, Faulkner explores identity, isolation, and societal expectations.
Absalom, Absalom! was published in 1936 and showcases one of Faulkner’s signature literary techniques: the use of multiple narrators and timelines. Through retrospective narration (recalling events from the past), Quentin Compson gradually learns about the history of the Sutpen family and its patriarch, Thomas Sutpen. The complex and fraught family history touches on themes of history, memory, and the South’s legacy in the wake of the Civil War. While these novels can be challenging reads, they are some of the best William Faulkner books because they evoke timeless moral dilemmas and questions about evil, tragedy, and human nature.
In-Depth Analysis: As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (published in 1930) focuses on the experiences of the Bundrens, an impoverished Southern family, in the lead-up to and aftermath of Addie Bundren’s death. Addie is married to Anse Bundren and is the mother of five children. Addie requests to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi, and her husband and children set out on a journey with her body in hopes of fulfilling this wish. They encounter obstacles along the way, and the narrative gradually reveals secrets about the various characters; for example, Dewey (Addie and Anse’s daughter) is secretly pregnant and trying to obtain an abortion, while Jewel (one of the Bundren sons) is illegitimate (the result of an affair Addie had).
The novel is told from the points of view of multiple narrators, and the language and style depend on which character is narrating. This sophisticated and complex narrative structure emphasizes the isolation and subjective perspective of each character. Both the structure and the plot allow Faulkner to develop themes including the confrontation between the rural past and the industrialized present, gender inequality, and the unknowable subjectivity of other people.
The poverty and rural isolation of the Bundren family make their journey much lengthier and more complicated; their trek toward the relatively developed and modernized town of Jefferson symbolizes the tension between the South becoming trapped in the past versus losing its connection to its history. The purpose of the journey, after all, is to bury Addie, and by the end of the novel, Anse Bundren has already found a new wife, symbolizing a failure to learn from the lessons of the past.
Female characters encounter additional challenges and suffering, particularly around motherhood and fertility—Dewey is desperate to terminate her pregnancy and is exploited because of this desperation, whereas the sections told from Addie’s perspective reveal that she led a grinding and thankless life of poverty and childbearing. The novel was well-received and played a significant role in solidifying Faulkner’s reputation as a leading figure in both Southern literature and Modernist fiction.
The Yoknapatawpha County Universe
Many of William Faulkner’s famous works are set in a fictional Mississippi county called Yoknapatawpha. Yoknapatawpha is modeled closely after Lafayette County, where Faulkner grew up; he renamed Oxford (the major town) as Jefferson. Inventing this fictional world allowed him to model his setting after a real place without the obligation to conduct research or strive for verisimilitude. Other writers have used this technique; Thomas Hardy, for example, set many of his novels in the fictional region of Wessex (in southern England), while contemporary novelist Jesmyn Ward has set most of her novels in a fictional Mississippi town called Bois Sauvage.
In Go Down, Moses (a collection of interlinked short stories), Faulkner makes use of the Yoknapatawpha County setting to explore themes of race, land, and inheritance. The stories describe individuals from two major families, the McCaslins and the Beauchamps, and their experiences over multiple generations; as landowners, these families have complex and often ambivalent relationships to the county where these stories are set.
In The Unvanquished, Faulkner sets the action between 1862 and 1873, describing the events and aftermath of the Civil War. The combination of a fictional setting with historical events allows Faulkner to explore memory, guilt, and family legacy. The novel also provides an example of how Faulkner returned repeatedly to the same setting to depict a specific place at different moments in history.
Faulkner’s Influence on Contemporary Literature
Faulkner’s Artistic Influences
Faulkner’s career overlapped with the Modernist movement, and he was influenced by notable Modernist writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Faulkner exemplifies Modernism’s preoccupation with fragmentation and the deconstruction of traditional literary forms and ways of knowing. Faulkner’s use of stream-of-consciousness narration is a key indicator of Modernism’s influence on his style, although he combined this technique with his specific preoccupations, such as the legacy of the Civil War. Faulkner was also influenced by older sources, including Shakespeare and Classical epics; the titles of some of his major works allude to other texts (for example, As I Lay Dying alludes to Homer’s Odyssey, while The Sound and the Fury alludes to a line from Macbeth).
Faulkner is also known for his development of a literary movement known as the Southern Gothic. The broader Gothic tradition developed in the 18th century and is characterized by an atmosphere of gloom and horror, mysteries, secrets and repression, and often elements of “perverse” sexuality, such as incest. Faulkner transposed many of these elements into a Southern setting and used them to explore race and gender in the South. In The Wild Palms, Faulkner includes two different narratives, set 10 years apart, and alternates between them chapter by chapter. The formal experimentation is paired with plot elements (including illicit sexuality, crime, and abortion) that draw on Gothic tropes, showing how Faulkner fused different influences to create his signature style.
Faulkner’s Legacy: Modern Authors and Faulknerian Themes
Faulkner’s writing influenced a number of prominent contemporary authors, including Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Richard Ford. Some of these authors have been influenced by Faulkner’s style, including stream-of-consciousness narration, the presence of multiple (often unreliable) narrators, and nonlinear chronologies. Faulkner’s The Hamlet is the first novel in a trilogy depicting events centering around the Snopes family as it gradually rises to power; the novel is primarily episodic, rather than focusing on a central plot. The use of a trilogy might have inspired works by later authors, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy.
Faulkner’s depictions of the South and complex, often ambiguous characters have also deeply impacted many authors. Still others have drawn inspiration from Faulkner’s use of specific settings, prevailing themes such as memory, legacy, and trauma, tropes associated with the Southern Gothic, or an often bleak and violent perspective on human nature. Several South American authors associated with the Magical Realist literary movement, notably Gabriel García Márquez, have also been influenced by Faulkner.
The Enduring Relevance of William Faulkner
Faulkner remains one of the most influential American writers; he is celebrated for his stylistic innovations, striking and complex use of language, and ability to vividly evoke a sense of place while considering timeless questions about the nature of good and evil. While Faulkner’s prose can be dense and the nonlinear structure of many of his books can take some getting used to, generations of readers have found the rewards worth the effort. William Faulkner’s best books can be illuminating and fascinating reads and can help to provide important context for the subsequent landscape of American (and especially Southern) fiction. In addition the titles mentioned above, check out the following study guides to enhance your understanding of William Faulkner’s stories and novels:
Short Stories:
“The Bear”