FUN with Faulkner!!

           


            On September 25, 1897, William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi.  His family was well of before the Civil War, but unfortunately the South lost all its money during the war.  Faulkner was bright but didn’t enjoy school, and very soon he dropped out of high school.  He tried to become a pilot for the U.S. Army, but failed to meet the physical requirements.  He traveled to Toronto, Canada and joined their army instead.
            After returning to the United States, Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi from 1919 until 1921; yet again he dropped out of school. He traveled to New York and attempted to get Stalk Young interested in his writing, but publishers were not interested at this point.  As a result, he returned to Oxford where he took a post as postmaster at the University of Mississippi. He continued writing.
            William Faulkner married his former sweetheart Estelle Oldham in 1929.  The couple had two daughters over the next four years.
            In order to make money in 1931, Faulkner wrote the novel Sanctuary. The dramatic topic seized the public’s consideration. The monetary success of Sanctuary drove sales to Faulkner’s earlier novel, The Sound and The Fury.  Like many people, William Faulkner’s was concerned financially as a result of the Great Depression.
             In 1949, William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature.  Faulkner no longer had to worry about money, and he continued to gain recognition for his writing during this period.  In 1950, he was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Howells Medal for Fiction and in 1951 he won the National Book Award for his collected stories.  From 1957 until 1958, he served as the writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia.  Faulkner died in 1962 of a heart attack.
             So what really is it that draws everybody towards Faulkner’s writing?  Maybe it’s conflict? Incest? Prejudice? Necrophilia? Mental illness? Suicide?  Madness?  William Faulkner tackled the ordinary and extraordinary aspects of life in the American South.  Faulkner was a vivid, ground-breaking, and odd man with a love of fragmented narratives and whiskey (as he began to drink heavily at the age of seventeen).  Throughout his life, he was a misfit who was known for his arrogance and his tendency to invent stories about himself.
            Faulkner's deviation from the norm led to great success, as he was able to revolutionize the idea of the narrative and also produce some of the greatest works of American literature.  His story is all the more captivating especially since he never graduated from high school!  Although Faulkner received many awards, he lived most of his life in obscurity.  He wasn’t regarded as a significant author until he was fifty years old.  In addition, he constantly struggled with alcoholism, debt, and repeated bouts of infidelity.  His life’s story is that of persistence, disappointment, originality, and achievement.
            Faulkner’s novels explore family dynamics, race, sex, and social class.  These novels have fascinated and tested readers for over sixty years with their characters, plot, and constant shifts in time.  If you've ever read a book that doesn't move from point A to point B but, instead, from point A to point Z to point S to point W and back and forth, Faulkner’s books is one of those.  Faulkner’s life can most be summed up in his quote from Light in August, “Memory believes before knowing remembers” (Goodreads).  I’m excited but also a little scared to explore Faulkner’s writing in the novel The Sound and the Fury.

Bibliography:

"A Quote by William Faulkner." Goodreads. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.             http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/4740-memory-believes-before-knowing-remembers- believes-longer-than-recollects-longer.
"William Faulkner." Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 25 Mar. 2015.   http://www.shmoop.com/william-faulkner/.
"William Faulkner- Biography." William Faulkner. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 Mar. 2015.   <http://www.egs.edu/library/william-faulkner/biography/>.