William+Faulkner

"Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than ﻿﻿your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself." -William Faulkner =William Faulkner By Katie B. =

William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi. William was the oldest of four sons born into a wealthy family who became fairly poor due to poverty. His parents were Murry and Maud Butler Falkner. After his grandfather, William Clark Falkner, who died eight years earlier due to a fight he had with an old business partner in the streets of Ripley, Mississippi, he was named William Cuthbert Falkner. When publishing his first book, the printer who set it up, misspelled his last name. Instead of trying to fix the mistake, he chose to just change his last name to Faulkner.

Before Williams fifth birthday, the family moved to Oxford, Mississippi. At a young age, the small Faulkner showed a great liking and talent for drawling and writing poetry but at about the sixth grade, he began to get bored with his studies. His early writings where romantic. Still young, William met two individuals who later played an important role in his future: his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, and a literary mentor, Phil Stone.



Estelle Oldham
Estelle had a very active social life. Besides William, she had dated other boys. Cornell Franklin, an Old Miss law student, proposed to Estelle and lightheartedly, she accepted believing he was going to Hawaii to establish a law practice. A few months later, he sent her an engagement ring. Her parents were thrilled and so she could then not get out of the marriage. They later married in Oxford on April 18, 1918. In 1921, William Faulkner occasionally saw Mrs. Oldham at the college on visits. Later on he gave her an eighty-eight-page typescript of poems entitled //Vision in Spring.//

Phil Stone
Enrolled at Yale and Old Miss, Stone also was a lawyer. Following Estelle's marriage, Stone invited William to come stay with him in New Haven. When settled, William then found a job with The Winchester Repeating Arms Company. In the month of June, William accepted an invitation to become a cadet in training in the Royal Air Force in Canada.

Before he met Phil Stone, he tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force but was denied because of his height. He lied about tons of facts such as his birth date and birthplace to pass himself as British to the RAF. That is when he started using Faulkner as his official last name. When he met up with the RAF, he tried to fake his British accent. Before he finished training in Toronto, the war had ended. since he did not get to fly, he received an honorable discharge and later bought an officer’s uniform and a set of wings for the breast pocket, even though he had never flown alone. Returning to Oxford in December 1918, he had never seen combat like he lead others to believe, he told many people about his war experience, one of which left him injured and in pain with a silver plate in his head. His short service in the RAF also served for his first written novel, //Soldiers’ Pay// in 1926. Later in 1927, he wrote //Mosquitoes.//

Back to Oxford in 1916, Faulkner enrolled in The University of Mississippi because of a program for war veterans, even though he never finished high school. In the following August, his first published poem appeared in the newspaper, //The New Republic.// While a student, William submitted many poems and short stories to the school paper, //The Mississippian//. Also sending in artwork to the university yearbook. In the fall of 1920, Faulkner founded a drama club called the "//Marionettes//," for which he wrote one play in titled //The Marionettes// but was never shown on stage. After three semesters, Faulkner dropped out that November. Years following, he did little odd jobs following the submission of reviews, poems, and short stories for the newspaper, //The Mississippian//. In 1921, Stark Young, a novelist in Oxford, Recommended William to a small book store in New York City as an assistant to Elizabeth Prall, later to become wife of the writer Sherwood Anderson. He was most known for his job as postmaster at the university in the post office from spring of 1922 to the fall of 1924. In being a lousy postmaster, no one was pleased. He would spend his time goofing off, loosing the mail, and failing to serve the customers. After being investigated, he resigned. During that time, he also worked as the Oxford Boy Cub Scout troops but yet again was asked to resign, this time because of "moral reasons,'' most likely because of a drinking problem. "[I] discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own." - William Faulkner

Faulkner had courted Helen Baird, a young lady like Estelle, who later married a different man. In 1929, William Faulkner and Estelle Oldham got married at College Hill Presbyterian Church outside of Oxford, Mississippi, two months after her and her first husband divorced. The marriage started off miserably. While they honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast Pascagoula, Estelle attempted to drown herself due to the feeling of entrapment. Upon returning to Oxford, they lived with relatives while they searched for land and a home, that of which was the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known as "The Bailey Place" in 1930. In June of 1933, Estelle gave birth to Faulkner’s only surviving daughter, Jill. Alabama Faulkner, first born child, died nine days after birth. Brought into the marriage was Estelle's two children, Malcolm and Victoria.



In 1933 Faulkner started to take flying lessons and he bought his own plane. To earn money and support Estelle, their three children, and some of the Oldhams, Faulker worked over the next 20 years in Hollywood on several screenplays, from //Today We Live (1933)// to //Land of the Pharaos (1955).//

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949 was awarded to William Faulkner, which he received one year later in 1950. On June 17, Faulkner was again injured by a fall from a horse. In constant pain now, he signaled something was wrong when he asked on July 5 to be taken to Wright’s Sanitarium in Byhalia. Though he had been a patient there many times, he had always been taken there before against his will. His nephew, Jimmy, and Estelle accompanied him on the 65-mile trip to Byhalia, where he was admitted at 6 p.m. Less than eight hours later, at about 1:30 a.m. on July 6, 1962 — the Old Colonel’s birthday — his heart stopped, and though the doctor on duty applied external heart massage for forty-five minutes, he could not resuscitate him. William Faulkner was dead of a heart attack at the age of 64.He was buried on July 7 at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford. Some of his books are as followed:
 * //Soldiers' Pay (1926)//
 * //Mosquitoes (1927)//
 * //Sartoris (1927)//
 * //The Sound and the Fury (1929)//
 * //As I Lay Dying (1930)//
 * //Light in August (1932)//

Collections of short stories and poems:
 * //The Marble Faun (1922)//
 * //The Green Bough (1933)//
 * //These Thirteen (1931)//
 * //Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934)//
 * //Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942)//
 * //Knight's Gambit (1949)//

Many of Williams novels contain the same settings and same characters. //Soldiers' Pay//, //Mosquitoes//, and //Sartoris// are the books that stared the Yoknapatawpha saga. Faulkner's imaginative re-creation of the American South is written to go along with the saga to better define and clarify the characters. The novels introduce families that reappear in many other novels representing the land-owning, Old South; and the Snopes clan, representing the ruthless New South.

Some of Faulkner's dramatic and emotional novels were very consistent and precise. Like most successful authors, Faulkner was considered the rival to Ernest Hemingway. Of the 1930's, he probably was the only true American Modernist fiction writer.


 * Resources**:

http://www.rowanoak.com/photos.html

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-bio.html

http://www.olemiss.edu/mwp/dir/faulkner_william/

http://kirjasto.sci.fi/faulkner.htm

http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap7/faulkner.html

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Du-Fi/Faulkner-William.html

http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Faulkner_William.html

http://www.shmoop.com/william-faulkner/timeline.html