Reproduced by permission of Archive Photos, Inc. William did not attend public school consistently after the fifth grade; he left high school prior to graduation in order to work in his grandfather's bank. William never earned his high school diploma despite being an avid reader and a lover of poetry. In , after the U. Army rejected him for being underweight and too short 5 feet 5 inches , Faulkner enlisted in the Canadian Air Force.
During his brief service in World War I —18; a war that involved most countries in Europe as well as many other nations in the world, and in which the United States participated from —18 , he suffered a leg injury in a plane accident. In he left the air force and returned home to Oxford. In Faulkner enrolled at the University of Mississippi as a special student, but left the next year for New York City. After several odd jobs in New York he left and again returned to Mississippi, where he became postmaster at the Mississippi University Station.
He was fired in for reading on the job. In he and a friend made a walking tour of Europe, returning home in During the years to Faulkner published a series of novels, none commercially successful.
But in the success of Sanctuary freed him of financial worries. He went to Hollywood for a year as a scriptwriter and an adviser. The turning point for Faulkner's reputation came in , when Malcolm Cowley published the influential The Portable Faulkner at this time all of Faulkner's books were out of print. The rapid and widespread praise for Faulkner's work was recognized in a Nobel Prize for Literature.
Faulkner had married Estelle Oldham, his childhood sweetheart, in , and they lived together in Oxford until his death. He was a quiet, dashing, courteous man, mustachioed and sharp-eyed. He constantly refused the role of celebrity: he permitted no prying into his private life and rarely granted interviews. William Faulkner died on July 6, , in a hospital in Byhalia, Mississippi. He was sixty-four years of age. During the early s Faulkner wrote poetry and fiction. In the volume of verse The Marble Faun , a printer's error allegedly introduced the "u" into the author's name, which he decided to retain.
Those words are often tossed around or screamed in frustration when discussing William Faulkner, the influential Southern writer with a dense style all his own. Novels like "Absalom, Absalom! Christopher Rieger, director of the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, offered some tips for processing the complex prose. Think of a Faulkner text as a suspense or mystery story — but with you the reader, instead of a character, as the detective.
Or think of the text as the slow unfolding of a jury trial with yourself as a juror, sitting in court listening to and sifting through the varying and sometimes contradictory testimonies of a parade of witnesses, knowing that finally you'll have to make up your own mind about what actually happened and who is and is not telling the truth. Be willing to suspend the need for instant gratification: Learn to appreciate and enjoy delayed revelations and a gradual unfolding of plot, characterization and theme.
Or, better yet, think of Faulkner's novels as symphonic in structure. And just as a symphony moves from section to section, presenting varying moods and impressions, altering speeds and rhythms, at times introducing leitmotifs — melodic phrases that are associated with an idea, person or situation — and themes that will be developed more fully later on, at other times looping backward to recapitulate earlier themes, but always advancing toward a final resolution, so too does the Faulkner novel employ shifting tones and impressions, hints and foreshadowings, repetitions and recapitulations, time shifts looping backward and forward, all consciously intended to shape the story not so much on the pages of the book but in the reader's mind and imagination.
Since, in many respects, Faulkner's stories are more about impressions than events or facts "I don't care much for facts," he said , the way to read a Faulkner novel, at least the first time, is to immerse yourself in the rich and powerful language. Lose yourself in its sounds and rhythms, delight in the detailed descriptions and the images, enjoy the voices of the characters — and wait, ignoring for the time being what happened before or what's going to happen next. Like an unfocused image on the screen, the Faulkner text typically appears all a blur for quite some time, but then Faulkner will begin gradually to turn the focus knob, bringing the story and its characters and meaning into sharper and sharper — though never absolute — focus.
An interviewer once said to Faulkner, "Some people say they can't understand your writing, even after they've read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them? It is now an accepted axiom that one cannot read high modernist texts from authors like James Joyce, T. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and Faulkner: We can only re-read them.
But why should that be a problem? All great literature deserves multiple readings, and with each new reading we discover things in the text that we had not seen or properly appreciated before. Lionel Trilling once observed that everyone should read "Huckleberry Finn" at least three times — once when we are young, once when we are middle-aged and once when we are old. Most experienced readers agree with this sentiment in principle, yet many of us still persist in our desire naive though it may be that a literary text reveal itself clearly and completely upon a first reading.
Interestingly, and ironically, literature seems to be the only art form that we feel this way about, the only one we are reluctant to revisit, even believing that the need to do so represents some kind of failure of the author.
We don't, of course, adopt this attitude toward painting or architecture or music or dance. William Faulkner died on July 6, Nobel Prizes Thirteen laureates were awarded a Nobel Prize in , for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. See them all presented here. Select the category or categories you would like to filter by Physics. His collaboration with Williams would eventually grow into a love affair. In August, he published Collected Stories , the third and last collection of stories published by Faulkner.
Two months later, Faulkner received word that the Swedish Academy had voted to award him and Bertrand Russell as corecipients of the Nobel Prize for literature, Russell for and Faulkner for the previous year. At first he refused to go to Stockholm to receive the award, but pressured by the U. State Department, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, and finally by his own family, he agreed to go. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.
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 and endurance. Pictured with Faulkner are Dr. As he completed the writing and revision of Requiem for a Nun , he received 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 published in September Back at home in June, he resumed his relationship with Joan Williams and continued working on A Fable with more and more difficulty. Suffering from acute back pain, Faulkner was hospitalized twice, in September and October. In November, Faulkner agreed to participate in a short documentary film financed by the Ford Foundation.
In March he was again hospitalized. The following month, Estelle suffered a hemorrhage and heart attack, so Faulkner returned to Oxford. At the end of the month, he traveled to Egypt to assist Howard Hawks in the filming of Land of the Pharaohs , their last collaboration. For the next several months, he traveled throughout Europe.
He met Jean Stein in St. In March, he received a letter from Jill, who wrote that she had met Paul D. Summers, a lieutenant at West Point, whom she would like to marry, and asked Faulkner to come home. He returned to Oxford at the end of April , after a six-month absence. The three novellas would in be published together under the title Three Famous Short Novels. Later that month, Jill and Paul Summers were married in Oxford. Now an internationally known public figure, Faulkner no longer refused to appear in public in his own nation, and he usually accepted the increasing requests by the State Department to attend cultural events abroad.
In addition, he also began to take a public stand as a moderate, if not liberal, southerner in the growing debate over school integration. In August, Faulkner began a three-month, seven-nation goodwill tour at the request of the State Department, traveling first to Japan, where at Nagano he participated in a seminar whose proceedings, along with two speeches 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 the murder of Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago who had been killed in Mississippi. In October, he left for London and then for Reykjavik, Iceland, where once again he attended a program of conferences and interviews.
He dedicated the book to his editor at Random House, Saxe Commins. In November, Faulkner condemned segregation in an address before the Southern Historical Association in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis, where because of segregation much effort was needed for blacks to be admitted.
Soon after, Faulkner would agree to become writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a period of eight to ten weeks every year. In April , black civil rights legend W. Du Bois challenged Faulkner to 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.
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 position I take in asking for moderation and patience is right practically then we will both waste our breath in debate.
From February to June , Faulkner was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia and agreed to a number of question-and-answer sessions with the students, faculty, and faculty spouses. Highlights of the taped sessions would be published in by Professors Joseph Blotner and Frederick Gwynn under the title Faulkner in the University. Now dividing his time between Oxford and Charlottesville, from February to May he fulfilled his second term as writer-in-residence at Virginia.
Also while living in Virginia, he began 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 in his pink membership coat. In March , Faulkner broke his collarbone in a fall from a horse at Farmington, a kind of accident that would continue to plague Faulkner for the remaining years of his life. 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.
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