William Faulkner Books, Quotes, Biography, Novels
William Faulkner (born William Cuthbert Falkner, 25 September 1897 – 6 July 1962) was an American novelist and short-story writer, the great chronicler of the Deep South. He invented Yoknapatawpha County—a fictional Mississippi county mapped onto Lafayette County around Oxford—and filled it with doomed aristocrats, poor whites, and the long shadow of slavery. He won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Born in New Albany, Mississippi; raised in Oxford. Named for his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner, a Confederate officer, railroad man, and popular novelist who was shot dead in a town square. Faulkner left high school, failed to get into the U.S. Army in World War I, joined the Canadian RAF (and added the “u” to his name), and never saw combat. He drifted through odd jobs, a New Orleans newspaper, brief university stints, and later Hollywood screenwriting (The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not) when the novels didn’t pay.
In 1929 he married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood love, after her first marriage ended. They lived at Rowan Oak in Oxford. A daughter, Alabama, died in infancy; another, Jill, survived. He drank hard, fell off horses, and spent late years as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. He died of a heart attack in Byhalia, Mississippi, on his great-grandfather’s birthday, at 64.
He was obscure in America for years even as Europeans read him. Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner (1946) revived his U.S. reputation. The Nobel speech (delivered 1950) is famous: the writer’s subject is “the human heart in conflict with itself.”
Multiple narrators, stream of consciousness, sentences that run for a page, time that folds backward. He wanted one book that was the whole history of a place. Families recur: Compsons, Sartorises, Sutpens, Snopeses. Race, land, honor, and decay are the raw material.
William Faulkner Most Popular Books
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
The Compson family’s collapse, told in four parts: Benjy’s fractured mind, Quentin’s Harvard suicide watch, Jason’s spite, then Dilsey’s kitchen on Easter. Modern Library ranked it among the century’s best. Hardest first read; many call it his masterpiece.
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Thomas Sutpen rides out of nowhere to build a plantation dynasty and is destroyed by the racial secret at its root. Told as rumor and reconstruction—Quentin Compson and his roommate piecing the South together in a cold Harvard room. Faulkner’s densest book on history and race.
As I Lay Dying (1930)
The Bundrens haul Addie’s corpse across Mississippi to bury her with her people. Fifteen narrators, including a child who thinks his mother is a fish. Short, grotesque, funny, and a technical stunt he wrote in weeks. Best place to start.
Light in August (1932)
Lena Grove walks toward Jefferson pregnant; Joe Christmas—racially ambiguous, violent, hunted—crosses her path. Clearest single-volume picture of the town and of Jim Crow’s color line.
Go Down, Moses (1942)
Linked stories of the McCaslin family, Black and white. Contains “The Bear,” one of the great American hunting/initiation stories and a reckoning with the wilderness and inherited sin.
The best places to find William Faulkner books online are:
eBay Books
Amazon.com Books
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