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William Faulkner: Northeast Mississippi
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Chronicler of the American South, William Faulkner's inventive imagination and and innovative use of language brought him an international reputation and influenced writers in Europe, Latin America, and China. His account of the historical change between the Old and the New South transcends regional issues or the mythical community of Yoknapatawpha, Mississippi, where most of his work is situated. Faulkner writes about broader themes: the clash of generations and ways of life, racial and family tragedies, and, in almost archetypal terms, the opposition of good and evil, Adapting James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness technique, he lets his characters reveal themselves in brilliantly
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In June 1918, Faulkner joined the Royal Air Force of Canada; he trained as a cadet pilot in Toronto until November, when the Armistice sent him homeward again. Back in Oxford, after swaggering around the square in his uniform, telling spurious tales about his combat in France, he renewed his attempts to become both an artist and a poet. He had learned to draw from his artistically inclined grandmother and mother; enrolling as a special student at the University of Mississippi, he illustrated several campus publications, as well as some poetry sequences he wrote for various girlfriends. After dropping out of the university in 1921, Faulkner took a brief job in a New York bookstore; there he met the future wife of Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Prall. Returning to Oxford in December, he accepted a position as postmaster at the university, a job he held, despite a lackadaisical attitude, until late 1924. His first book of poetry, The Marble Faun (1924), continued his work in the decadent/neo-romantic vein.
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Faulkner took a series of jobs during the early 1920s, including a stint as the postmaster of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, a position from which he was fired in 1924. The same year a friend helped him publish his first book, a volume of poetry called The Marbled Faun. During 1925 he lived in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he became a friend of the American novelist Sherwood Anderson, who encouraged him to write fiction. Anderson helped Faulkner find a publisher for his first novel, Soldiers' Pay (1926), about a wounded soldier’s homecoming in a small Southern town. The book received positive reviews and Faulkner had found his life’s work, although financial hardship forced him to continue to take menial jobs for several years thereafter. In 1929 Faulkner married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham.
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William Cuthbert Faulkner's forebears first came into Northeast Mississippi about the same time--circa 1840--the town of Oxford and, a few years later, the University of Mississippi were founded. The Falkner family history is typical of the struggle of the American pioneer: fraught with sickness, violence, despair, fortune, and war. This history presented a variety of colorful incidents and people who would appear in somewhat altered forms as events and characters in William Faulkner's literature, as was the case with the "Old Colonel," William Clark Falkner, William Faulkner's great-grandfather, dead for eight years at the time William Cuthbert Faulkner was born, September 25, 1897.
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Faulkner moved to New Orleans in 1925, where his friendship with Elizabeth Prall led to an apprenticeship with Sherwood Anderson, whom she had married. In Anderson’s literary circle Faulkner became acquainted with Freud’s theories of sexuality, the mythic world of anthropologist Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, and the sweeping implications of the literary innovations of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. He ... absorbed the ennui and despair of the post-war generation, and melded all these influences, first in a series of literary sketches published by the New Orleans Times Picayune and The Double Dealer (a literary magazine) and then in a first novel, Soldier’s Pay. Faulkner meanwhile left for Europe, spending time in Italy and England but reacting most strongly to France, beginning a lifelong love affair with that country. Returning to Mississippi, Faulkner took a series of jobs while working on his second novel, Mosquitoes (1927).
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Faulkner married Estelle Oldham (19 February 1896 to 11 May 1972) in June 1929 at College Hill Presbyterian Church just outside of Oxford, Mississippi. They honeymooned on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, at Pascagoula, then returned to Oxford, first living with relatives while they searched for a home of their own to purchase. In 1930 Faulkner purchased the antebellum home Rowan Oak, known at that time as "The Bailey Place" where he and his family lived until his daughter Jill, after her mother's death, sold the property to the University of Mississippi in 1972. The house and furnishings are maintained much as they were in Faulkner's time. Still, today, one can find Faulkner's scribblings on the wall here, notably, the day-by-day outline covering an entire week that he wrote out on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in the dense novel A Fable.
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