William Faulkner | Biography – Flashcards

Will Faulkner, was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi.

Faulkner was one of the most important writers in Southern literature in the United States

Faulkner wanted to join the United States Army, he was not accepted due to his short height and joined the British Royal Flying Corps instead.

Faulkner wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay in 1925.

Faulkner published 13 novels

In 1929, Faulkner married his teenage love Estelle Oldham

William Faulkner died from a myocardial infarction at the age of 64 on July 6, 1962.

He is buried at the St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford

He is considered to be one of the most important writers of the American southern literature and ranked shoulder to shoulder with other significant writers

His first novel was Soldiers’ Pay

He never graduated from high school or earned a college degree

He was born William Cuthbert Falkner-his name was first know to have been spelled Faulkner in employee records at a job in New Haven, where Faulkner worked with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company

He was Southern writer

Born: September 25, 1897

William Faulkner, a major American twentieth-century author, wrote historical novels portraying the decline and decay of the upper crust of Southern society.

He was the oldest of four brothers.

In 1919 Faulkner enrolled at the University of Mississippi as a special student, but left the next year for New York City.

The book generally regarded as Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury

Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Two of his works, A Fable and his last novel The Reivers , won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

He also wrote screenplays for Hollywood, including the 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren

Faulkner used a method of writing that has been dubbed a “stream of consciousness” writing technique.

…4.The main character in the 1991 film Barton Fink is said to be based on William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald

…3.Faulkner lived in Hollywood during the 1930s and wrote screenplays, including The Big Sleep and the film adaptation of To Have and Have Not

…2.The author Joan Williams claims to have had a four-year affair with Faulkner. She wrote about it in the novel The Wintering.

…1.Although William Faulkner is one of literature’s best-known alcoholics, he insists he never drank while writing. He used liquor as a way to escape his life, but he did not feel that it aided the creative process in any way.

…He wrote two volumes of poetry The Marble Faun (1924), which is named after a Nathanial Hawthorne novel, and A Green Bough (1933), as well as a short story collection of crime-fiction called Knight’s Gambit

x Faulkner declined a dinner invitation from First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, saying, “That’s a long way to go just to eat.

… The beginning of 1920s till the outbreak of World War II was the most productive period of Faulkner’s writing career.

Faulkner’s other romantic relationships outside marriage included affairs with Meta Carpenter, Joan Williams, Else Johnson and Jean Stein.

…His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was an important figure in northern Mississippi who served as a colonel in the Confederate Army, founded a railroad, and gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County

He had a serious drinking problem throughout his life, but he didn’t drink while writing

From 1949 to 1953, he conducted an affair with a young writer who considered him her mentor. The relationship with Joan Williams (1928-2004) became the subject of her third novel, called The Wintering

Faulkner served as Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia from 1957 until his death at Wright’s Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi of a heart attack at the age of 64.

The novel Sanctuary (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished southern family

In 1940, Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, to be followed by two volumes, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), all of them tracing the rise of the insidious Snopes family to positions of power and wealth in the community

The reivers, his last – and most humorous – work, with great many similarities to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, appeared in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death.

..The human drama in Faulkner’s novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants.

He grew up in Oxford, Miss., which appears in his fiction as “Jefferson” in “Yoknapatawpha County

His 1955 lecture tour of Japan is recorded in Faulkner at Nagano (1956).

In 1957-1958 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia; his dialogues with students make up Faulkner in the University (1959)

During the early 1920s Faulkner wrote poetry and fiction.

The money for another book of poems, The Green Bough (1933), was supplied by a lawyer friend, Philip Stone, on whom the lawyer in Faulkner’s later fiction is modeled.

Faulkner is considered a fine practitioner of the short-story form, and some of his stories, such as “A Rose for Emily,” are widely anthologized.

The book generally regarded as Faulkner’s masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929), is a radical departure from conventional novelistic form.

As I Lay Dying (1930) is a farcical burlesque epic, again using the multiple stream-of-consciousness method to tell the grotesque, humorous story of a family of poor whites intent on fulfilling the mother’s deathbed request for burial.

The story in Light in August (1932) takes place in a single day.

Faulkner’s creativity ebbed after 1935. Though occasionally interesting and fitfully brilliant, his work tended to be increasingly repetitious, perverse, and mannered to the point of self-parody.

Pylon (1935), one of Faulkner’s weakest novels, is the story of a flying circus team.

Two minor novels, The Unvanquished (1938) and The Wild Palms (1939), were followed by an uneven but intriguing satire of the Snopes clan, The Hamlet (1940).

A Fable (1954) is a very poor parable of Christ and Judas.

The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962), a trilogy that is part of the Yoknapatawpha saga, are generally regarded as minor works.

Faulkner is considered a fine writer of the short story, and some of his stories, such as “A Rose for Emily,” are widely anthologized (put into a collection of literature).

His collections—These Thirteen (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949)—deal with themes similar to those in his novels and include many of the same characters.

Will Faulkner, was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi.

He was born William Cuthbert Falkner-his name was first know to have been spelled Faulkner in employee records at a job in New Haven, where Faulkner worked with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company

Faulkner had a smoke house on the property, where he cured his own bacon, ham and sausage

William demonstrated artistic talent at a young age, drawing and writing poetry, but around the sixth grade he began to grow increasingly bored with his studies.

His earliest literary efforts were romantic, conscientiously modeled on English poets such as Burns, Thomson, Housman, and Swinburne

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

His most notorious job during this period was his stint as postmaster in the university post office from the spring of 1922 to October 31, 1924.

The author Joan Williams claims to have had a four-year affair with Faulkner. She wrote about it in the novel The Wintering.

In January 1925, Faulkner moved to New Orleans and fell in with a literary crowd which included Sherwood Anderson (author of Winesburg, Ohio) and centered around The Double Dealer, a literary magazine whose credits include the first published works of Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson.

Faulkner published several essays and sketches in The Double Dealer and in the New Orleans Times-Picayune; the latter would later be collected under the title New Orleans Sketches. He wrote his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay, and on Anderson’s advice sent it to the publisher Horace Liveright.

He was the oldest of four brothers.

His collections—These Thirteen (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949)—deal with themes similar to those in his novels and include many of the same characters.

He wrote two volumes of poetry The Marble Faun (1924), which is named after a Nathanial Hawthorne novel, and A Green Bough (1933), as well as a short story

William Faulkner, a major American twentieth-century author, wrote historical novels portraying the decline and decay of the upper crust of Southern society

After The Sound and the Fury was published in October 1929, Faulkner had to turn his attention to making money.

The year 1930 was significant to Faulkner for two other reasons as well, both of which took place in April.

His first novel was Soldiers’ Pay

Faulkner spent much of 1936 and the first eight months of 1937 in Hollywood, again working for 20th Century-Fox, receiving on-screen writing credit for Slave Ship (1937) and contributing to the story for Gunga Din (1939).

In the winter of 1937-1938, Faulkner bought “Bailey’s Woods,” a wooded area adjacent to Rowan Oak, and Greenfield Farm, located seventeen miles from Oxford, which he would turn over to his brother John to manage.

Faulkner lived in Hollywood during the 1930s and wrote screenplays, including The Big Sleep and the film adaptation of To Have and Have Not

Faulkner published 13 novels

William Faulkner died from a myocardial infarction at the age of 64 on July 6, 1962.

He won a nobel peace prize.

In 1929, Faulkner married his teenage love Estelle Oldham

He had a serious drinking problem throughout his life, but he didn’t drink while writing

Faulkner used a method of writing that has been dubbed a “stream of consciousness” writing technique

His collections—These Thirteen (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949)—deal with themes similar to those in his novels and include many of the same characters.

His collections—These Thirteen (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949)—deal with themes similar to those in his novels and include many of the same characters.