LoC Blog: William Faulkner

Novelist William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, on September 25, 1897. He spent much of his youth in Oxford where his father was employed as the secretary and then business manager for the University of Mississippi.

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

From Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III, by William Faulkner

 
Portrait of William Faulkner. Carl Van Vechten, photographer, Dec. 11, 1954. Van Vechten Collection. Prints & Photographs Division.

Faulkner was the creator of the mythical Yoknapatawpha County External in Mississippi. He portrayed a landscape of universal themes through decayed Southern white gentry, merchants, farmers, poor whites, and persecuted blacks. In stories notable for their experimental narrative techniques, he wrote about the troubled legacy of race, the conflicts between the values of the agrarian Old South and the industrial New South, and dysfunction both within the family and within the larger community. Faulkner’s characters confront institutionalized racial violence and intimate crime while struggling to live with dignity, meaning, and compassion, often in the face of degradation and humiliation.
William Faulkner left high school before graduating and attended university only briefly, dropping out in the first semester of his sophomore year. Despondent over a love affair and inspired by aspirations for military glory, he joined the Canadian Royal Air Force but never saw active service. Upon returning to Oxford, he was appointed postmaster of the University of Mississippi, a job he was unable to maintain.

Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all. . . .
“Now I want you to tell me just one more thing. Why do you hate the South?”
“I dont hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I dont hate it,” he said. I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark;I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!
From Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Faulkner lived for a short time in New Orleans, where he received encouragement from writer Sherwood Anderson. He also traveled to France and Italy, though he made no attempt to meet any of the Lost Generation of expatriate American artists who had settled in Europe after World War I. Aside from these ventures and stints as a Hollywood screenwriter, Faulkner spent the remainder of his life in Mississippi and Virginia, writing brilliantly and prolifically in isolation from his peers.
After his third novel was rejected by the publisher Horace Liveright for its “diffuse” plot and characterization, Faulkner assumed that his work would not receive public recognition, but he was determined to continue writing for his own fulfillment. In fact, he achieved notice with his very next novel, The Sound and the Fury, which was praised by most reviewers upon its publication in October 1929. He continued to publish novels and poems for the next three decades. Faulkner was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes External, in 1955 for A Fable, and in 1963 for The Reivers. He received the Nobel Prize External for Literature in 1949 “for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.” During his brief acceptance speech, Faulkner spoke of the human condition and the writer’s duty in the nuclear era:

I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.

William Faulkner, “Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech External“

Two women walking along street, Natchez, Mississippi . Ben Shahn, photographer, Oct. 1935. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Prints & Photographs Division

Wife of Negro sharecropper, Lee County, Mississippi. Arthur Rothstein, photographer, Aug. 1935. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Prints & Photographs Division

Playing dominoes or cards in front of drug store in center of town, in Mississippi Delta, Mississippi. Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, Oct. 1939. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives. Prints & Photographs Division

 

via https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/september-25#william-faulkner