LYCOS RETRIEVER
William Faulkner: Northeast Mississippi
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William Faulkner reads from his story "The Old Man." This excerpt includes a dizzying range of plot elements, including a fleeing convict who is guiding a boat over the flooding Mississippi; on board is a pregnant woman about to give birth. Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897 and set many of his stories along the river in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954 and 1962.
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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 proved unable to maintain.
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William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, as the oldest of four sons of Murray Charles Faulkner and Maud (Butler) Faulkner. While he was still a child, the family settled in Oxford in north-central Mississippi. Faulkner lived most of his life in the town. About the age of 13, he began to write poetry. At the Oxford High School he played quarterback on football team and suffered a broken nose. Before graduating, he dropped out school and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank.
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William Faulkner was born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. At the age of five, Faulkner and his parents, Murray and Maud Butler Faulkner, moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent most of his childhood. William Faulkner never stood more than five feet six inches tall, but was a giant in the writing world. His works are known internationally.
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Faulkner was born William Cuthbert Falkner in a Mississippi that had been an untamed frontier within living memory. It had packed an epic span of history into 80 years of statehood. During Faulkner’s youth, the region’s past was an enduring, palpable presence, festering like an open sore on the present. The shame of a 40-year-old defeat and the loss of a way of life based on the mores of a bygone English gentry weighed heavily on turn-of-the-century Southerners. So, too, did the adventure-filled legends of Faulkner’s ancestors—prominent players in Mississippi’s saga—echo as rebukes to their less-colorful sons. Faulkner’s great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, moved south from Missouri in 1842 at age 17.
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William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962) was an American novelist and poet whose works feature his native state of Mississippi. He is regarded as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. Faulkner's writing is often criticized as being dense, meandering and difficult to understand due to his heavy use of such literary techniques as symbolism, allegory, multiple narrators and points of view, non-linear narrative, and especially stream of consciousness. Faulkner was known for an experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence, in contrast to the minimalist understatement of his peer Ernest Hemingway. Faulkner is sometimes lauded as the inventor of the "stream-of-consciousness" technique in fiction, although this is misleading; other writers, specifically the French novelists of the nineteenth century, probably used this technique first, although Faulkner, once he had discovered this way of writing, used it on a regular basis for the rest of his career, and is by far the most acclaimed American writer in this area. Along with Mark Twain and possibly Tennessee Williams, Faulkner is considered to be one of the most important Southern writers.
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