Who Was Faulkner?


FAULKNER’S LIFE AND WORKS

Faulkner was born on 25th September, 1897 at New Albany, the eldest of the four sons of Murry C. Faulkner and his wife, Maud Rutler of Oxford. The family moved to Oxford while Faulkner was still a child, and it was there that he grew up and went to school. He made no particular impression upon his teachers and left high school without graduating. He seems, at first, to have done little but wander about and read without much sense of purpose or direction, but in 1914 he began his friendship with Phil Stone, who already had degrees from the University of Mississippi and from Vale. Stone, four years his senior, told him what to read, talked with him about literature and about the South, and encouraged and criticized the writing, which at that time and for sometime afterwards was mostly verse.

When World War I began, Faulkner was unable to join the American army but he joined the Royal Air Force in Canada and began his training as a pilot. Despite the legends that have grown up around him, he never went to Europe. Back in Oxford after the war, he seems to have devoted himself for a time to the cultivation of mild eccentricities. For a short while, he attended the University of Mississippi, doing quite well in Spanish and French but failing disastrously in English. Late in 1920 at the invitation of Stark Young, who was also from northern Mississippi, he made his first visit to New York. He worked in a book-shop for a time but the only useful result of the trip seems to have been his friendship with Elizabeth Brall, whose marriage to Sherwood Anderson was to give Faulkner his first introduction to a really lively literary circle. For a while , however, Faulkner returned to Oxford to become university postmaster. He is said to have discharged the functions of that office with notable inefficiency and, on the occasion of his dismissal, he declared that at least he would no longer be at the beck and call of anyone who happened to have two cents for a stamp.

By this time, he had published several poems in the University’s year-book and in its newspaper, The Mississippean, and one each in The New Republic and the New Orleans “little magazine”, the Double Dealer: and in 1924, the year the postmastership ended, Phil Stone financed the private publication of a small volume of Faulkner’s verse entitled The Marble Faun. This was Faulkner’s first experience of book publication, and an unhappy one, for the book attracted few sales and little attention. Shortly afterwards, he set off for New Orleans, where he intended to take a boat to Europe. But he met Sherwood Anderson and stayed on in the city for six months, enjoying his first experience of literary society and publishing sketches in the Time Picayane newspaper and in the Double Dealer. Anderson at this time was at the height of his reputation, and the recognition and encouragement he gave to Faulkner was an extremely important factor in the youngman’s career.

In 1929, Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, an Oxford girl whom he had known for many years and who had two children by a previous marriage. In 1930s and 1940s, Faulkner made several visits to Hollywood, lasting weeks or months at a time and worked as script-writer on a variety of films including those of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not and Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. The world of Hollywood has had unfortunate effects upon a good many American writers who had been attracted there. That Faulkner had escaped these effects seems to be largely due to his refusal to become involved in Hollywood’s social life and to his acceptance of script-writing as neither an artistic challenge nor a way of life, but as a short-term job of craftsmanship to be done honestly and then left behind. Faulkner seems to have thoroughly disliked Hollywood itself and one of the best known stories about him tells of his asking the studio people if he could work at home for a while. Faulkner’s sole reason for going to Hollywood was to make money. In the early thirties, he purchased a handsome house built before the Civil War and this involved him in heavy expenses. His fondness for flying was also costly, though he gave this up almost completely after the death of his younger brother, Dean in a flying accident in 1935. Another expense was his attachment to strong drink. Coughlan describes in some detail which he calls Faulkner’s “alcoholic holiday from reality.”

In 1950, Faulkner was awarded Nobel Prize for literature. His famous address on the occasion of the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm has been the forerunner of a remarkable number of speeches, articles, letters to newspapers, and other public statements in which he has forcibly expressed his views on the past, present and future of the South, the United States and human race. He has made public appearance on several occasions and has travelled abroad a good deal notably to Europe and Japan. In 1951, Faulkner got the National Book Award for Collected Stories. He delivered the famous Commencement Address at Pine Manor College in 1953, and addressed the International Writers’ Conference, at Sao Paulo in Brazil. He was awarded the National Book Award for A Fable in March 1955 and the Pulitzer Prize in May 1955. In 1957, Faulkner began his term as writers in residence at the University of Virginia. The State Department sent him on a trip to Greece the same year, where he received the Silver Medal for Athens Academy. In 1962, Faulkner was invited to the White House but he refused. He died at Oxford on July 6, 1962. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously.

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