William Faulkner

William Faulkner was a prolific writer who became very famous during his lifetime but who shied away from the spotlight as much as possible. He is remembered as both a gentlemanly southern eccentric and an arrogant, snobbish alcoholic. But perhaps the best way to describe Faulkner is to describe his heritage, for, like so many of his literary characters, Faulkner was profoundly affected by his family.

Faulkner's great grandfather, Colonel William Falkner (Faulkner added the "u" to his name), was born in 1825 and moved to Mississippi at the age of 14. He was a lawyer, writer, politician, soldier, and pioneer who was involved in several murder trials including two in which he was accused and was a best-selling novelist. During the Civil War he recruited a (Confederate) regiment and was elected its colonel, but his arrogance caused his troop to demote him and he left to recruit another regiment. After the war he became involved in the railroad business and made a lot of money; he bought a plantation and began to write books, one of which became a best-seller. He ran for Mississippi state legislature in 1889, but his opponent shot and killed him before the election.

Faulkner's grandfather was the colonel's oldest son, John Wesley Thompson Falkner. He inherited his father's railroad fortune and became an Assistant U.S. Attorney. He later became the president of the First National Bank of Oxford, Mississippi.

Faulkner's father was Murray Falkner, who moved from job to job before becoming the business manager of the University of Mississippi, where he and his family lived for the rest of his life. William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 and began to write poetry as a teenager. During World War I, he joined the Canadian Royal Flying Corps he was too short to join the U.S. Air Force but never fought; the day he graduated from the Flying Corps the Armistice was signed. The only "war injury" he received was the result of getting drunk and partying too hard on Armistice Day, wherein he injured his leg.

After the war, Faulkner came back to Oxford, enrolled as a special student at the University of Mississippi and began to write for the school papers and magazines, quickly earning a reputation as an eccentric. His strange routines, swanky dressing habits, and inability to hold down a job earned him the nickname "Count Nocount." He became postmaster of the University in 1921 and resigned three years later. In 1924 his first book of poetry, The Marble Faun, was published, but it was critically panned and had few buyers.

In early 1925 Faulkner and a friend traveled to New Orleans with the intention of getting Faulkner a berth on a ship to Europe, where he planned to refine his writing skills. But instead Faulkner ended up staying in New Orleans for a few months and writing. There he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, whose book Winesburg, Ohio was a pillar of American Modernism. His friendship with Anderson inspired him to start writing novels, and in a short time he finished his first novel, Soldier's Pay, which was published in 1926 and was critically accepted although it sold few copies. Faulkner eventually did travel to Europe, but quickly returned to Oxford to write.

Faulkner wrote four more novels between 1926 and 1931: Mosquitoes (1927), Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), and As I Lay Dying (1930), but none of them sold well, and he earned little money in this period. Finally, in 1931, Sanctuary was published and became financially successful. Suddenly Faulkner's work began selling, and even magazines that had rejected his stories in the past clamored to publish them. Even Hollywood sought after him to write.

Faulkner's first big purchase was a large mansion in Oxford, where he lived and wrote, gaining a reputation as a reclusive curmudgeon. Between this time and the 1940s, Faulkner wrote seven more novels, including his famous Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and, in typical Faulkner fashion, he sent his friends into a frenzy by refusing to attend the ceremony (although he eventually did go). In the latter part of the 1950s, he spent some time away from Oxford, including spending a year as a writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He returned to Oxford in June of 1962 and died of a heart attack on the morning of July 6 of that year.

2. Faulkner's style is not very easy - in this he has connections to European literary modernism. His sentences are long and hypnotic; sometimes he withholds important details or refers to people or events that the reader will not learn about until much later.

3. http://www.hotchkiss.k12.co.us/HHS/nobelnov/faulkner.htm

Information for rose for Emily

1. http://www.gradesaver.com/ClassicNotes/Titles/faulkner/essays/essay1.html

In the words of Oscar Wilde, "The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves." Conflict between the "well-bred" people and their "wise" counterparts satiates William Faulkner's short stories "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning." The inability of Emily Grierson in "A Rose for Emily" and Abner Snopes' father in "Barn Burning" to accept and cope with their changing environments leads to an even greater quarrel with their neighbors; in each of Faulkner's stories, this inability escalates into a horrific murder. "A Rose for Emily" and "Barn Burning" are filled with gross contradictions that make conflict unavoidable.

In "A Rose for Emily," different characters hold two opposing views of time itself. The first interpretation of time is that of a "world as present, a mechanical progression" (West 75). The narrator, the new Board of Aldermen, Homer Barron, and the newest generation represent this interpretation. These individuals, holding a new, less restricted point of view, prefer to keep everything set down in books, a practice strongly disapproved of by those who interpret their time as a "world of tradition, divided from us by the most recent decade of years" (West 75). Emily Grierson and her Negro servant, Colonel Sartoris, and the old Board of Aldermen represent this old view. This old view of time prefers the social decorum associated with the Old South. All of the supporters of the old view are survivors of