William Faulkner

William Faulkner, the American novelist writer, short story writer and one time screen writer, known for an experimental style with all to diction and cadence. Faulkner, in his novels chosen characters from all walks of life ranging from former slaves or descendents of slaves, to poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, to Southern aristocrats. His characters were also representative of different shades of a human life from highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes from Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters.His diverse selection of themes and characters,made him one of the most admired writer of modern American novel. He won Pulitzer Award twice and Noble Prize for Literature in 1949.

Biographer

William Faulkner (1897-1962) is an American novelist known for his epic portrayal of the tragic conflict between the old and the new South. Although Faulkner`s intricate plots and complex narrative style alienated many readers of his early writings, he was a literary genius whose powerful works and creative vision earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize in literature.

Faulkner was a towering figure in American literature during the first half of the 20th century. With Ernest Hemingway, he is usually considered one of the two greatest American novelists of his era. Faulkner was particularly noted for the eloquent richness of his prose style and for the unique blend of tragedy and humour in his works. His novels have a stunning emotional impact and his characters are highly memorable. The dramatic force and vividness of Faulkner’s best work is unsurpassed in modern fiction.

Using the decay and corruption of the South after the American Civil War (1861-1865) as a background, Faulkner portrayed the tragedy that occurs when the traditional values of a society disintegrate. Some of his chief concerns were the nature of evil and guilt and the relationship between the past and the present.

Despite his preoccupation with depravity and violence, however, Faulkner also wrote of people’s capacity to perform acts of nobility and goodness.

Popular Book:
The Sound and the Fury

It is often regarded as Faulkner’s finest novel. In the book he portrayed the decline of a Southerner aristocratic family, the Compsons. The emotional intensity of this novel is heightened by the technique of allowing the main characters to tell the story in internal monologues that reflect their own disordered—and sometimes even insane—point of view.

The novel has achieved a great deal of critical success and has secured a prominent place among the greatest of American novels, often considered as one of the 100 greatest books of all time. Recently, it was selected by the Modern Library as the sixth greatest English-language novel of the twentieth century. It should be noted, though, that the selections of the Modern Library committee for the `greatest English novels of the twentieth century` were only chosen from those works published at some point in the Modern Library catalog itself. It also played a role in William Faulkner`s receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Other Creations:
Novels

Soldiers` Pay (1926)
Father Abraham (written: 1926/1927 pub: 1983)
Mosquitoes (1927)
Sartoris/Flags in the Dust (1929/1973)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Sanctuary (1931)
Light in August (1932)
Pylon (1935)
Absalom, Absalom! (1937)
The Unvanquished (1938)
If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (The Wild Palms/Old Man) (1939)
The Hamlet (1940)
Go Down, Moses (1942). Episodic novel made up of rewritten previous published short stories.
Intruder in the Dust (1948)
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
A Fable (1954)
The Town (1957)
The Mansion (1959)
The Reivers (1962)

Short stories

"Landing in Luck" (1919)
"The Hill" (1922)
"New Orleans"
"Mirrors of Chartres Street" (1925)
"Damon and Pythias Unlimited" (1925)
"Jealousy" (1925)
"Cheest" (1925)
"Out of Nazareth" (1925)
"The Kingdom of God" (1925)
"The Rosary" (1925)
"The Cobbler" (1925)
"Chance" (1925)
"Sunset" (1925)
"The Kid Learns" (1925)
"The Liar" (1925)
"Home" (1925)
"Episode" (1925)
"Country Mice" (1925)
"Yo Ho and Two Bottles of Rum" (1925)
"Music - Sweeter than the Angels Sing"
"A Rose for Emily" (1930)
"Honor" (1930)
"Thrift" (1930)
"Red Leaves" (1930)
"Ad Astra" (1931)
"Dry September" (1931)
"That Evening Sun" (1931)
"Hair" (1931)
"Spotted Horses" (1931)
"The Hound" (1931)
"Fox Hunt" (1931)
"Carcassonne" (1931)
"Divorce in Naples" (1931)
"Victory" (1931)
"All the Dead Pilots" (1931)
"Crevasse" (1931)
"Mistral" (1931)
"A Justice" (1931)
"Dr. Martino" (1931)
"Idyll in the Desert" (1931)
"Miss Zilphia Grant" (1932)
"Death Drag" (1932)
"Centaur in Brass" (1932)
"Once Aboard the Lugger (I)" (1932)
"Lizards in Jamshyd`s Courtyard" (1932)
"Turnabout" (1932)
"Smoke" (1932)
"Mountain Victory" (1932)
"There Was a Queen" (1933)
"Artist at Home" (1933)
"Beyond" (1933)
"Elly" (1934)
"Pennsylvania Station" (1934)
"Wash" (1934)
"A Bear Hunt" (1934)
"The Leg" (1934)
"Black Music" (1934)
"Mule in the Yard" (1934)
"Ambuscade" (1934)
"Retreat" (1934)
"Lo!" (1934)
"Raid" (1934)
"Skirmish at Sartoris" (1935)
"Golden Land" (1935)
"That Will Be Fine" (1935)
"Uncle Willy" (1935)
"Lion" (1935)
"The Brooch" (1936)
"Two Dollar Wife" (1936)
"Fool About a Horse" (1936)
"Vendee" (1936)
"Monk" (1937)
"Barn Burning" (1939)
"Hand Upon the Waters" (1939)
"A Point of Law" (1940)
"The Old People" (1940)
"Pantaloon in Black" (1940)
"Gold Is Not Always" (1940)
"Tomorrow" (1940). Filmed in 1972, starring Robert Duvall.
"The Tall Men" (1941)
"Two Soldiers" (1942) Filmed in 2003.
"Delta Autumn" (1942)
"The Bear" (1942)
"Afternoon of a Cow" (1943)
"Shingles for the Lord" (1943)
"My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek" (1943)
"Shall Not Perish" (1943)
"Appendix, Compson, 1699-1945" (1946)
"An Error in Chemistry" (1946)
"A Courtship" (1948)
"Knight`s Gambit" (1949)
"Nobel Prize Award Speech" (1949)
"A Name for the City" (1950)
"Notes on a Horsethief" (1951)
"Mississippi" (1954)
"Sepulture South: Gaslight" (1954)
"Race at Morning" (1955)
"By the People" (1955)
"Hell Creek Crossing" (1962)
"Mr. Acarius" (1965)
"The Wishing Tree" (1967)
"Al Jackson" (1971)
"And Now What`s To Do" (1973)
"Nympholepsy" (1973)
"The Priest" (1976)
"Mayday" (1977)
"Frankie and Johnny" (1978)
"Don Giovanni" (1979)
"Peter" (1979)
"A Portrait of Elmer" (1979)
"Adolescence" (1979)
"Snow" (1979)
"Moonlight" (1979)
"With Caution and Dispatch" (1979)
"Hog Pawn" (1979)
"A Dangerous Man" (1979)
"A Return" (1979)
"The Big Shot" (1979)
"Once Aboard the Lugger (II)" (1979)
"Dull Tale" (1979)
"Evangeline" (1979)
"Love" (1988)
"Christmas Tree" (1995)
"Rose of Lebanon" (1995)
"Lucas Beauchamp" (1999)

Poetry

Vision in Spring (1921)
The Marble Faun (1924)
A Green Bough (1933)
This Earth, a Poem (1932)
Mississippi Poems (1979)
Helen, a Courtship and Mississippi Poems (1981).

Awards & Prizes

Faulkner received the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel." He donated a portion of his Nobel winnings "to establish a fund to support and encourage new fiction writers," eventually resulting in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He donated another portion to a local Oxford bank to establish an account to provide scholarship funds to help educate African-American education majors at nearby Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Faulkner also won two Pulitzer Prizes, his 1954 novel A Fable, which took the Pulitzer in 1955, and the 1962 novel, The Revivers, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer in 1963. He also won two National Book Awards, first for his Collected Stories in 1951 and once again for his novel A Fable in 1955.

On August 3, 1987, the United States Postal Service issued a 22-cent postage stamp in his honour.

Quotes

“A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.”

“No man can write who is not first a humanitarian.”

“The end of wisdom is to dream high enough to lose the dream in the seeking of it.”

“Tomorrow night is nothing but one long sleepless wrestle with yesterday`s omissions and regrets.”

“Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.”