William faulkner (1897-1962)

William Faulkner, one of the leading American 20th-century novelists, was born in New Albany, Mississippi in, a declined aristocratic family. Faulkner was in the eleventh grade of the Oxford High School, when the First World War broke out. His war experiences played an important part in the formation of his character. He enlisted as a cadet in the Canadian branch of the Royal Flying Corps in 1918. He was trained as a pilot in To­ronto, but the war ended before he was commissioned. His dis­appointment at missing the experience of combat is reflected in several of his early stories.

After the war Faulkner returned to Oxford and worked as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi. At the same time he took some courses at the University. Faulkner began to write soon after the war. At first he wrote poetry. He went to New York where he worked in a book-store at the same time writing stories. His first published work, a volume of poems entitled "The Marble Faun", appeared in 1924. It did not win public at­tention. In the following year he went to New Orleans, where he met Sherwood Anderson who encouraged him to write "Sol­dier's Pay". It was published in 1926. In spirit Faulkner's first novel was close to the moods of the lost generation. He showed the tragedy of the war generation returning to peacetime life crippled both physically and spiritually. The writer portrayed man as a mere plaything at the mercy of blind forces. The only saving grace to Faulkner was the purity, kindness and sacrifice of an individual. The novel established his reputation as a cre­ative writer but it was not a great success.

From 1925 to 1929 he continued working at odd jobs as car­penter and housepainter writing novels at the same time. "Mosquitos" was published in 1927 and "Sartoris" in 1929. The lat­ter initiated the theme of the disintegration of the aristocratic South to which Faulkner returned repeatedly throughout his lit­erary career.

In the same year Faulkner published "The Sound and the Fury" which established his fame in literary circles. He gave up his odd jobs to devote himself to full-time writing. "Sanctuary" (1931), a story of violence and murder, which he wrote solely to make money, created a sensation and brought its author fi­nancial independence. Since then his fame increased with eve­ry new novel.

In the thirties Faulkner wrote his dark horror novels full of violence, pathology and irrationality: "As I Lay Dying" (1930), "Light in August" (1932) and "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936). In 1942, Faulkner published a collection of stories entitled "Go Down, Moses, and Other Stories". It includes on of his best stories "The Bear". In 1948 he wrote "Intruder in the Dust", one of his most significant social novels on the Negro problem. In the forties and fifties Faulkner published his best work—"The Snopes Trilogy" consisting of "The Hamlet" (1940), "The Town" (1957) and "The Mansion" (1959). Faulkner's last major novel was "The Fable" (1954), a complicated parable of humanity and war. Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. He died at the age of sixty-five.

William Faulkner is a very complicated and controversial writ­er. He belongs to the Southern School of American writers.

In his stories and novels Faulkner has been conducting a long, painful and heroic examination of the Southern myth. His attitude to it is dual. Faulkner pities the proud and courtly South­ern aristocrats watching their plantations fall a prey to the ava­rice of social upstarts. On the other hand, he is aware of their being doomed and corrupt. The Southern myth of chivalry is a falsehood because the land has been eternally cursed by the evil institution of slavery. Faulkner sees the Negroes and the whites bound together by the irony of history. They are involved in an inextricable web of shame, guilt and evil, corrupting both, the slaves and the slave-holders. His approach to the Negro problem is not social but purely aesthetic, moral and psycho­logical.

Faulkner is a social-psychological novelist. The social scene in his novels had been presented in two ways—either in an ob­jective (epic) manner or in a subjective (lyric) manner. In "The Snopes Trilogy" the disintegration of Southern gentry has been presented directly through the recording of the events. In "The Sound and the Fury" it has been portrayed indirectly by dissect­ing the twisted souls of the members of an aristocratic family.