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William Faulkner: Novels
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By 1945, when Faulkner's novels were out of print, he moved again to Hollywood to write under contract movie scripts, mostly for director Howard Hawks. He had read Faulkner's 1926 novel Soldier's Pay when it had just appeared and recommended it to his friends. In the early 1930s Faulkner had written for the director an adaptation from his short story 'Turn About'. Their first meeting ended in heavy drinking, and started a long friendship. "Just a year apart in age, with Hawks the senior, both were reserved to the point of noncommunicativemess; Nunnally Johnson was astonished by the sight of the two of them just sitting together not saying a word. When they did talk, they did do slowly, in a drawling manner." (Todd McCarthy in Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, 1997) Faulkner cooperated with Hawks among others in the films To Have and Have Not (1944), based freely on Ernest Hemingway's novel, and The Big Sleep (1946), based on Raymond Chandler's novel.
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Faulkner was a towering figure in American literature during the first half of the 20th century. With Ernest Hemingway, he is usually considered one of the two greatest American novelists of his era. Faulkner was particularly noted for the eloquent richness of his prose style and for the unique blend of tragedy and humor in his works. His novels have a stunning emotional impact and his characters are highly memorable. The dramatic force and vividness of Faulkner’s best work is unsurpassed in modern fiction.
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Much has been made of the fact that Faulkner had a serious drinking problem throughout his life. He was not alone in this area; a list of contemporaneous American writers who struggled with alcohol would stretch to several pages. But as Faulkner himself stated on several occasions, and as was witnessed by members of his family, the press, and friends at various periods over the course of his career, he did not drink while writing, nor did he believe that alcohol helped to fuel the creative process. It is now widely believed that Faulkner used alcohol as an "escape valve" from the day-to-day pressures of his regular life, including his never-ending and maddening financial straits, rather than the more romantic vision of a brilliant writer who needed alcohol to pursue his craft. From 1949 to 1953, he conducted an affair with a young writer who considered him her mentor. The relationship with Joan Williams (1928-2004) became the subject of her third novel, called The Wintering (1971).
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[F]or characters' conscious thoughts, Faulkner uses the style they would use when speaking. And in such passages he puts the thought inside single quotation marks or in italics. For example, in the novel's opening paragraph, "Lena thinks, 'I have come from Alabama: a fur piece. All the way from Alabama a-walking. A fur piece.'" The single quotes seem to indicate thoughts formulated in words. Italics, as in the passage that follows the sentences just quoted, often seem to suggest thoughts not quite so explicitly verbalized.
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Although some critics and reviewers praised his talent, for twenty years Faulkner's novels sold poorly. He made his living with straightforward stories written for magazines and stints as a Hollywood screenwriter. In 1944 Faulkner's career was apparently at a dead end. He seemed doomed to be regarded as a regional writer with a very small following. He was out of step with the social realism and left-leaning ideology that had dominated fiction in the preceding decade.
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Faulkner is considered a fine writer of the short story, and some of his stories, such as "A Rose for Emily," are widely anthologized (put into a collection of literature). His collections—These Thirteen (1931), Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), Go Down, Moses and Other Stories (1942), and Knight's Gambit (1949)—deal with themes similar to those in his novels and include many of the same characters.
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