William Faulkner

From Hart and Leininger's Oxford Companion to American Literature:

FAULKNER (originally FALKNER), WILLIAM [HARRISON] (1897-1962), grew up in Oxford, Miss., the great-grandson of William C. Falkner* and a member of a family like that of the Sartoris clan in his novels centered on "Jefferson" in his mythical Yoknapatawpha County.* After desultory education he joined the British Royal Air Force in Canada because he was too slight for U.S. requirements, but World War I ended before he was commissioned or saw service beyond training. Following the war he took some courses at the University of Mississippi and published The Marble Faun (1924), pastoral poems. Drifting to New Orleans, where he worked on a newspaper and also wrote the fiction collected in New Orleans Sketches (1958), he met Sherwood Anderson, who helped him to publish Soldier's Pay* (1926), his first novel, about the homecoming of a dying soldier, in the vein of the "lost generation." Following a brief stay in Europe (1925) he issued Mosquitoes (1927), a satirical novel set in New Orleans, later the site of his minor novel Pylon (1935), about aviators at a Mardi Gras.

With the publication of Sartoris* (1929), he found his own themes and setting, for it is the first novel in his long, loosely constructed Yoknapatawpha saga, whose themes include the decline of the Compson,* Sartoris,* Benbow,* and McCaslin* families, representatives of the Old South, and the rise of the unscrupulous Snopes* family, which displaces them. The life of the region is treated from the days of Indian possession, through the pre-Civil War era, down to moderen times. The saga of macabre violence and antic comedy is written in a sensitive but often baroque style and depicts this region as a microcosm in which its subjects often achieve mythic proportions. The Sound and the Fury introduces the significant but decadent Compson family in a remarkably structured stroy. As I Lay Dying* (1930) reveals the psychological relationships of a subnormal poor-white family on a pilgrimage to bury their mother. Sanctuary* (1931) is a sadistic horror story, ostensibly written to make money but carefully reworked before publication as a serious novel. Light in August* (1932), although also filled with horrors, is a more balanced contrast of positive and negative forces of life in its presentation of violent adventures involved in the relation between men and women, black and white. Absalom, Absalom!* (1936), set in early 19th-century Jefferson, shows the tragic downfall of the dynastic desires of the planter Colonel Supten. The Unvanquished* (1938) uses earlier short stories to create a novel about the Sartoris family in the Civil War. The Wild Palms (1939) shows the effects of a Mississippi flood on the lives of a hillbilly convict and a New Orleans doctor and his mistress. The Hamlet* (1940), the first volume of a trilogy, shows the rise to power of the depraved Snopes family. Intruder in the Dust* (1948) is a more compassionate tale of a black man on trial and the concomitant moral awareness of a white boy. Requiem for a Nun (1951), a sequel to Sanctuary, combines the forms of play and novel to treat the tortured redemption of Temple Drake. A Fable* (1954, Pulitzer Prize) is a lengthy parable of the Passion of Christ set in a framework of fake armistice and actual mutiny in World War I. The Town* (1957)  carries on the story of the white trash Flem Snopes and his coming to Jefferson, while The Mansion* (1960) concludes the Snopes story by treating the family in the first half of the 20th century. The Reivers* (1962, Pulitzer Prize), published just before the author's death, is an amusing fictive "reminiscence" of a boy's various misadventures in 1905. Many of the novels' characters, settings, and themes appear in stories collected in These 13 (1931); Idyll in the Desert (1931); Miss Zilphia Grant (1932); Dr. Martino (1934); Go down, Moses (1942), including the symbolic novelette "The Bear"*; Knight's Gambit (1959); Big Woods (1955), hunting tales; and Uncollected Stories (1979). Salmagundi (1932) gathers early essays and poems, and A Green Bough  (1933) collects poems. Other works include Early Prose and Poetry (1962), Essays, Speeches and Public Letters (1965) and Flags in the Dust (1973), the original uncut text of Sartoris.

During the 1930s he was off and on in Hollywood as a script writer, but his works for film are not accounted as being of much consequence. Critical views stated while teaching in Japan, at the University of Virginia, and at West Point appear in Faulkner at Nagano (1956), Faulkner in the University (1959), and Faulkner at West Point (1964). Lesser works include posthumously published juvenilia, Marionettes: A Play in One Act (1975) and Mayday (1976), while The Wishing Tree (1967) is a book for children. Vision in the Spring (1984) publishes 14 poems that he gathered in 1921. Selected Letters appeared in 1977. For his literary accomplishments Faulkner was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1950 and in acceptance made a brief but important statement about his belief "that man will not merely endure: he will prevail . . . because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance" and "the writer's duty is to write about these things."

The Sound and the Fury, novel by Faulkner,* published in 1929. The story is told in four parts through the stream of consciousness of three characters (the sons of the Compson family,* Benjy, Quentin, and Jason) and finally in an objective account.

The Compson family, formerly genteel Southern patricians, now lead a degenerate, perverted life on their shrunken plantation near Jefferson, Miss. The disintegration of the family, which clings to outworn aristocratic conventions, is counterpoised by the strength of the black servants, who include the old Dilsey and ther son Luster. The latter tends the idiot Benjy Compson, who is 33 and incapable of speech or any but the simplest actions. Through his broken thoughts, which revert to his childhood at every chance stimulation of his acute senses, is disclosed the tragedy of the drunken father; his proud, snivelling, hypochondriac mother; his weak-minded Uncle Maury; his sister Candace (Caddy), whom he adores because she is kind to him; his mean, dishonest brother Jason; and his sensistive brother Quentin, a promising student at Harvard, who goes mad, obsessed by love of Caddy, and, shamed by her seduction, commits suicide. When Caddy is forced to marry and leave home, Benjy is desolate, but he plays like a child with her illegitimate daughter, until she grows up, gives evidence of her mother's nymphomaniac strain, runs away with a tent-show performer, and steals a sum of money from Jason.


Light in August, novel by William Faulkner, published in 1932.

Joe Christmas is the son of Milly Hines and a travelling circus man, who is murdered by Milly's father, Eupheus Hines, because Hines is fanatically convinced of the man's Negro blood. When Milly dies in chidbirth, Hines leaves the infant on the steps of a white orphanage on Christmas night (the source of Joe's surname) and takes a job there to watch, with mingles hatred and religious fervor, the wroking out of God's will. Whn he is five, Joe innocently surprises Miss Atkins, the dietician, and an intern making love, and, convinced that Joe will tell on her, she informs the matron that he is black. Acoordingly he is seent away to be adopted by Simon McEachern, a puritanical farmer who believes only in hard work and austere religion. Stoically enduring McEachern's whippings, Joe does not rebel until he is 18 and has his first romantic experience, with a waitress, but when they are pursued by the suspicious McEachern, Joe strikes and perhaps kills him. The girl refuses to go away with him, and with her employers she leaves him robbed, beaten, and deeply embittered. Jose embarks on 15 jears of compulsive wandering along the nightmare-like "empty street" of restless experience, sometimes passing for a white, sometimes living as a black among black people, hating both by turns and often flaunting his mixed blood. At 33 he takes work in the Jefferson planing mill, and lives in a cabin near the home of Joanna Burden, a reclusive white woman of New England descent who is liberal towards blacks, believing them "forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins." They become lovers, she giving way to a primitive passion, and he persisting in his bitter detachment. Joe drifts into bootlegging with a whiteman who calls himself Joe Brown but who is really named Lucas Burch and who has fled to Jefferson from Alabama to escape a country girl, Lena Grove, whom he has seduced. Busy with his new life, Joe neglects Joanna, who becomes intensely religious. Her efforts to convert him make him so enraged that he cuts her throat and sets her house afire. Although Joe is not detected, Brown is seen drunk in the blazing house, where the body is discovered, and has to hide. Meanwhile the pregnant Lena arrives in Jefferson to search for Lucas Burch, and because of the similarity of surnames, is led to meet Byron Bunch another millworker and a choir leader. He not only realizes that the man called Brown is really Burch but he also falls in love with Lena. As her time is near, Bunch finds her a place to stay and creates in the disgraced minister Gail Hightower a compassionate interest in her situation. When Brown hears that $1000 is offered for the capture of Miss Burden's killer, , he returns to accuse Joe, and when he himself is suspected, tells the sheriff that Joe is a black, thus convincing the sheriff of Joe's guilt. After Hightower delivers Lena's child, Byron contrives to have Brown confronted with her and the baby, and Brown gives up the reward to flee once more. Joe is caught, and Hines, his grandfather, who still thinks himself an avenging angel of the white race, comes to Jefferson to stir up a lynch mob, from which Joe escapes to take refuge in Hightower's house. There he is found by Percy Grimm, a racist who shoots and castrates him. The district attorney, Gavin Stevens, sends Joe's body to his grandmother, who has dazedly confuesd Lena's baby with the infant "Joey" of 36 years before, and Byron accompanies Lena, still serenely self-sufficient, as she travels on towards the "destiny" Highwater sees for her, "peopling in tranquil obedience to it the good earth."

Hemingway and Faulkner