In this short biography, I attempt to highlight some of the aspects of Faulkner's life that may have influenced his work. These elements are written in bold. There are also a few links to sites that pertain to Faulknerian history.

William Cuthbert Falkner (this is the original spelling of his family name) was born on September 25, 1887 in New Albany, Mississippi, into a long-established Southern family. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, respectfully known as the "Old Colonel" because he had been a colonel in the Civil War, had owned a plantation and started a railroad (in the grand tradition of Southern gentility). Faulkner's grandfather, the "Young Colonel," and father, Murray Falkner, never felt like they fully lived up to the financial and social success of the almost mythic figure of the "Old Colonel," although the "Young Colonel" was prosperous enough to start a bank in Oxford, Mississippi. (It seems as though Faulkner drew on this immediate family history in his first semi-sucessful novel Flags in the Dust in which the younger "Colonel Sartoris," a draggling descendant of the heroic Civil War veteran Colonel Sartoris, is a bank president in Jefferson, Mississippi.)

When young William Falkner was only five, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, the town that Faulkner would count as his home for the rest of his life and which served as the inspiration for his fictional town of Jefferson, Mississippi. As a child, Faulkner showed some signs of his creative genius, often writing short stories, but he was always a mediocre student, and he graduated from neither high school nor college. During his late adolescence, Faulkner was especially influenced by two people, Estelle Oldham, who would eventually become his wife, and Phil Stone, his literary mentor. At one point, Faulkner said that Estelle was like a sister to him, that they were so similar he almost felt like a marriage would be inappropriate, a concern that could help to explain Faulkner's obsession with incest in so many of his great works. However, when Estelle was forced by her family into an undesired marriage in 1918, Faulkner was completely free to pursue other interests, and he followed Phil Stone to Connecticut where he worked briefly. Soon after, Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force of Canada (having been rejected from the US Army Air Force because of his modest 5'6" height), but he never saw war action. Nevertheless, his experience in the RAF deeply influenced him, providing the raw material for his very first novel Soldier's Pay as well as for numerous short stories. He returned to Oxford in late !918, full of highly embroidered stories about action he never saw and war wounds he never received. It was his creative impulses flaring up again.

Starting in 1919, Faulkner enrolled in the University of Mississippi at Oxford for a little over a year, but the world of academia did not hold his interest for long. He dropped out of the school and fumbled through a series of odd jobs, including being the local postmaster, before he finally got on his literary legs. In 1924, Faulkner published a book of poetry entitled The Marble Faun with the help of Phil Stone. Like most of Faulkner's poetry, it was not a success. However, it was enough to convince Faulkner that he was destined to be a writer. He moved to New Orleans, where he hobnobbed with a crowd of similarly literary-minded people including Sherwood Anderson, a circle of friends that he partially tried to satirize in his second novel Mosquitoes. It was during this time that Soldier's Pay was written and published and Mosquitoes began. Generally, these two first novels are considered Faulkner's weakest work.

After Mosquitoes, Faulkner was advised by Sherwood Anderson to write from experience, to write about what he knew from his childhood and hometown arena. With Flags in the Dust, Faulkner fulfilled this advice. Flags in the Dust is the first novel which takes place in his mythical Yoknapatawpha County, the setting of all but three of his novels from this point onward. Faulkner was immensely pleased with the result. In an interview in the mid 1950s, Faulkner recalled, "Beginning with Sartoris [Flags in the Dust], I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it . . ." (Lion in the Garden 255). Unfortunately, Faulkner's publishers weren't so enthusiastic. Faulkner was forced to chop and splice his novel by almost a third, retitling it Sartoris for its 1929 publication. The entire text of Flags in the Dust was not ressurected and published until after his death.

However, despite the relative failure of Flags in the Dust/Sartoris, Faulkner had finally hit his literary stride. Faulkner's period of highest achievement is generally considered to fall between the publication of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Go Down, Moses (1942). With The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner claimed he had been writing purely for himself, with no thought of editorial/publisher reactions, and the result is a monumental, revolutionary novel. In fact, between these two dates, Faulkner churned out a veritable library of literary classics: As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Pylon (1935), Absalom, Absalom (1936), The Unvanquished (1938), The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) (1939), and The Hamlet (1940).

Although Faulkner has gained wide critical acclaim for these novels today, he was neither receiving bags full of fan mail nor buckets full of money in the 1930s. Each of Faulkner's novels was moderately successful, especially Sanctuary whose untasteful subject matter carried huge popular appeal; however, Faulkner was always struggling against debt, and he had yet to establish himself as the great American writer that he wanted to be known as. Moreover, the financial pressures on Faulkner had increased since he had finally married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham Franklin, in June of 1929 and was now responsible for her and her two children from the previous marriage. In 1930, he also bought a house in Oxford, an old antibellum plantation-style house which seemed perfect for the veteran Southern writer. He proudly named it "Rowan Oak" and lived there for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, what with a family and the new house, Faulkner often had to supplement the meagre salary he was receiving from his novels with the sale of short stories which appeared in such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post: a fact which explains the prolific outpouring of shorter work during this time.

1932 and 1933 introduced two whole new elements into Faulkner's way of life: his rocky, sporadic relationship with Hollywood and a baby daughter. In May of 1932, Faulkner became a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. One of the first films for which Faulkner received credit, Today We Live, was based on one of his own short stories, "Turn About." Moreover, still pressed for money, Faulkner sold the rights to Sanctuary which premiered as the Paramount movie The Story of Temple Drake in 1933. With some of the money from these jobs, Faulkner bought an airplane, giving into his love for avaiation, a passion which can be seen in the novel Pylon. Faulkner's stints in Hollywood would continue into the 1940s, and he lent his hand to an impressive array of films, including The Road to Glory (1936), Slave Ship (1937), Gunga Din (1939), To Have and Have Not (1946), and The Big Sleep (1946), which have remained popular to this day. Gaining an entirely different kind of immortality, Faulkner became a father in 1933: Jill Faulkner Summers would be his only surviving child.

By the early 1940s, Faulkner was at something of a standstill, idling over his novel A Fable and fretting over his debts and his lack of national notoriety. Although he was still working for Hollywood, his literary creativity and novel sales had slumped. Enter Malcolm Cowley. Cowley agreed to work on a publication for Faulkner entitled The Portable Faulkner which included short stories and some snippets from his novels and theoretically traced the historical saga of Yoknapatawpha County. Faulkner contributed other interesting pieces to this work, including a critical introduction and an appendix to The Sound and the Fury. The publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 sparked new-found interest in Faulkner's work and became the turning point of Faulkner's popularity in America.

Faulkner began writing again, starting with the detective-style novel Intruder in the Dust (1948) which MGM immediately snapped up the rights to, making it into the 1949 film Intruder in the Dust. Other novels followed: Knight's Gambit (1949), Requiem for a Nun (1950), A Fable (1954), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962).

Faulkner also began reeling in awards. His new-found fame finally brought the popularity and financial ease for which he had been struggling for so long. In June of 1950, Faulkner received the Hovell's Medal for distinguished work in American fiction and, only a few months later, was informed that he was the Nobel Prize recipient for 1949. Faulkner went, rather grudgingly, to deliver his highly acclaimed and relatively inspiring acceptance speech in Stockholm (go the the Recommended Links section of this page to find a link to this speech). Faulkner also won a Gold Medal for fiction and two Pulitzer Prizes, one for A Fable and one posthumously for his humorous masterpiece The Reivers.

Meanwhile, Faulkner's growing fame also meant more demands for public appearances. Faulkner was incredibly visible in the 1950s: as a representative to an international writing conference, as a relatively vocal spokesman on the necessity of integration (a fact which sheds some light on his treatment of race in his novels), as an ambassador for the State Department, as the Writer in Residence at the University of Virginia, and above all as a beloved American writer.

During his later years, Faulkner had not been in the best of health, partially a result of his alcoholism. Moreover, after taking up fox-hunting, Faulkner suffered from several severe falls off his horse. Finally, an July 6, 1962, Faulkner died at the age of 64 of a heart attack and was burried in a cemetary in Oxford. Like most great artists, he was mourned around the world.