William Faulkner

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An American writer of novels, short stories, essays, and screenplays, William Cuthbert Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, and is best known for his novels and stories about the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which is based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived for much of his life.  Three of his novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August made the Modern Library’s list of the top one hundred English-language novels of the twentieth century.  Surprisingly Faulkner remained mostly unknown to the public until winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.  Two of his books, A Fable (1954), and The Reivers (1962), won Pulitzer Prizes for fiction.

His most popular, and what many consider his greatest work, The Sound and the Fury, was published in 1929 when William was only thirty-two years-old.  The story progresses through stream of consciousness narratives in four different sections.  Three of them feature first-person narrators, each a member of the Compson family, recounting events of both the present and the past in highly stylized, overlapping layers of brilliant prose.  The fourth section uses a third-person omniscient narrator to follow Dilsey, the Compsons’ faithful servant and a strong African American mother.  This book reigns as an indisputable masterpiece and towering achievement of American Literature.

The title, The Sound and the Fury, comes from a monologue in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when the despairing king finds himself overwhelmed by fears, sins, and dangers.  “She should have died hereafter/There would have been time for such a word./To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow/Creeps in this petty pace from day to day/To the last syllable of recorded time/And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/The way to dusty death.  Out, out brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing.”

The passage echoes the words of King Solomon in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “All is vanity,” and reading Faulkner one feels the apparent futility of the characters’ struggles, yet can’t help caring for them as they fight for hope and dignity while also fighting among themselves.  He wrote his first novel, Soldier’s Pay, in 1925 in New Orleans, after Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) urged him to start writing fiction.  Anderson helped with the publication of Soldier’s Pay and his second novel, Mosquitoes, by recommending the books to his own publisher.

William Faulkner pioneered the new form of stream of consciousness prose, simultaneously documenting Southern life in the early twentieth century, and weaving magnificent tales of hardship, faith, and perseverance.  The Compson family along with his other characters face obstacles that would level most families and leave them crying in the dust, but these carry on, forge ahead hoping their promise waits around the next bend.  The poetry of his narratives is breathtaking, the journeys inspiring, fascinating, and heartbreaking.  William passed away in 1962, two days after the 4th of July.  Rest in peace, Mr. Faulkner.

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