William Faulkner Biography Quotes 49 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family Background
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, into a family whose history and myths would suffuse his fiction. His father, Murry C. Falkner, and his mother, Maud Butler Falkner, moved the family to Oxford, Mississippi, when William was a child; Oxford and the surrounding Lafayette County became the living model for the imagined landscape of his books. The family spelled its name Falkner, but William adopted the variant Faulkner as a young man. The legend of his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, a Civil War veteran and novelist, cast a long cultural shadow that helped shape Faulkner's preoccupation with memory, honor, violence, and the burdens of the past.

Education and Early Apprenticeship
Faulkner left formal schooling early but read widely and wrote poetry before attempting prose fiction. In 1918 he sought to serve in World War I, training with the Royal Air Force in Canada; the war ended before he saw combat, but the experience left him with a veteran's pose and a lifelong interest in the costs of war. After returning to Mississippi, he attended the University of Mississippi as a special student, contributed to campus publications, and worked for a time as the university postmaster. He published a volume of poetry before turning decisively to fiction.

New Orleans, Sherwood Anderson, and the First Novels
In the mid-1920s Faulkner spent productive months in New Orleans, where friendships and literary talk with Sherwood Anderson proved pivotal. Anderson encouraged the younger writer, and his support helped Faulkner publish Soldier's Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927). A trip to Europe broadened Faulkner's horizons, but he soon returned to Mississippi, where he began reshaping his material around a region he knew intimately.

Inventing Yoknapatawpha
With Sartoris (1929), reworked from a longer manuscript later published as Flags in the Dust, Faulkner introduced the mythical Yoknapatawpha County, a meticulously imagined stand-in for Lafayette County. He would populate it with interwoven families and histories across dozens of works, even sketching a map to guide readers. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) confirmed his mastery. These novels, with their shifting voices, nonlinear time, and probing into race, class, sexuality, and guilt, built an epic of the modern South. Short stories such as A Rose for Emily and Barn Burning extended the same terrain with concentrated power.

Style, Methods, and Themes
Faulkner's formal innovations included multiple narrators, interior monologue, long sentences punctuated by sudden lyricism, and a deep attention to how memory fractures chronology. He explored the legacies of slavery and the Civil War, the operations of violence and pride in family and community, and the friction between modernity and tradition. Although often grouped with modernists, he also contributed decisively to Southern Gothic, rendering decay and moral extremity as symptoms of historical trauma. His fictional families, especially the Compsons, Sutpens, and Snopeses, let him study power, desire, and social mobility over generations.

Hollywood and Financial Pressures
Despite his rising reputation, Faulkner's books did not always sell well. To support himself and his household, he accepted studio work in Hollywood. Collaborating with director Howard Hawks, he contributed to screenplays for films such as Today We Live, To Have and Have Not, and The Big Sleep, working alongside writers like Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman. He found the industry constraining but appreciated the steady income, which allowed him to continue writing novels at home in Mississippi.

Home, Family, and Literary Circle
In 1929 Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, and they made their home at Rowan Oak in Oxford, which he purchased and renovated into a quiet base for work. Estelle's children from her first marriage, and later the couple's daughter, Jill, formed the core of his domestic life. Friends and associates such as Ben Wasson, his early advocate; Malcolm Cowley, whose editorial work on The Portable Faulkner (1946) helped revive critical attention; and publishers and editors including Harrison Smith and Saxe Commins, shaped the reception and circulation of his books. Fellow writers and neighbors, among them his brother John Faulkner, were part of the lifeworld from which he drew character and incident.

Recognition and Later Work
By the mid-1940s Faulkner's stature had grown. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, delivering in 1950 a famous speech insisting on the endurance of humanity and the writer's duty to articulate courage and compassion. The Collected Stories won a National Book Award in 1951. A Fable (1954) earned both the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in 1955, while The Reivers (1962) received a posthumous Pulitzer in 1963. He continued the Snopes trilogy with The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), extending his long study of social change and ambition in Yoknapatawpha.

Public Roles and Teaching
In the 1950s Faulkner undertook cultural missions abroad for the U.S. State Department, speaking about American literature and the writer's responsibilities during the Cold War. He also served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, meeting students, giving readings, and answering questions with a mixture of courtliness and candor. These engagements, though sometimes at odds with his private temperament, widened his audience and preserved a record of his views on craft and culture.

Health, Habits, and Final Years
Horses, hunting, and walking the woods anchored Faulkner's routines at Rowan Oak, even as periods of heavy drinking and riding accidents affected his health. Despite physical setbacks, he maintained a disciplined writing life, rising early to work. He died on July 6, 1962, at a sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi, after a heart attack. He was buried in Oxford, the town that, transfigured into Yoknapatawpha, had become the enduring scene of his imagination.

Legacy
Faulkner's influence is vast. His architectures of time and voice reshaped the American novel and opened pathways for writers across the world. By constructing a county that was both local and universal, he demonstrated how a single place could contain the full complexity of human experience. His books continue to challenge and reward readers, scholars, and fellow artists, standing as a monument to the capacity of fiction to reckon with history, memory, and the persistent questions of moral choice.

Our collection contains 49 quotes who is written by William, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Art.

Other people realated to William: Mario Vargas Llosa (Writer), Shelby Foote (Author), Sherwood Anderson (Writer), Claude Simon (Writer), Irving Ravetch (Screenwriter), Alfred Kazin (Critic)