WILLIAM FAULKNER
September 25, 1897 - July 6, 1962

"The writer is of no importance. Only what he creates is important,
since there is nothing new to be said."

~ The first of four sons, he was named after his great-grandfather, "Old Colonel," who was a lawyer, politician, planter, businessman, Civil War officer, railroad financier and best-selling author. 

~ While a child, Falkner's family moved to Oxford, Mississippi. Falkner would live most of his life in that town.

~ At the age of 13, William began to draw and write poetry. He dropped out of high school before graduating and worked briefly in his grandfather's bank.

~ When he took a job in New Haven with the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, his name was erroneously spelled "Faulkner" on his employee records. He never corrected it.

~ After being rejected from the US Army because he was too short, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He served with the RAF in World War I, but didn't see any action.

~ This didn't stop him from exaggerating his war record when he got home.

~ After the war he studied literature at the University of Mississippi. He also wrote poems and drew cartoons for the university's humor magazine, The Scream. He left the university without a degree.

~ Over the next few years, Faulkner moved around, working odd jobs and getting fired from them. He drifted to New Orleans, where Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write fiction rather than poetry.

~ His first book, The Marble Faun, which was a collection of poems, appeared in 1924. It didn't sell well. This was followed by several novels that didn't fair much better.

~ In 1929 Faulkner wrote Sartoris, the first of fifteen novels set in Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional region of Mississippi.

~ In the same year, he also married Estelle Oldham Franklin, his childhood sweetheart.

~ Architecture was important to Faulkner. He obsessed over the restoration of his house, Rowan Oak, and named his books after buildings.

~ In January 1931, Estelle gave birth to a daughter, Alabama. The child was born prematurely, and only lived a few days. Faulkner dedicated his first collection of short stories, These 13, to her. 

~ To earn money, Faulkner went to Hollywood and worked on screenplays. Over the next twenty years, he would work on such successes as To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. 

~ When Hemingway turned down director Howard Hawk's offer to work with his own book, the director said, "I'll get Faulkner to do it; he can write better than you can anyway."

~ When Faulkner finished a writing project, he went on a drinking binge. In 1936, back in Oxford, he began the first of many stays at a "rehab." 

~ In November 1949, the majority of the Swedish Academy voted to award the Nobel Prize for literature to Faulkner. But since a unanimous vote was required, the awarding had to be delayed by a year. At first Faulkner refused to go to Stockholm to receive it, but pressured by the U.S. State Department, the Swedish Ambassador to the United States, and finally by his own family, he agreed to go. 

~ In his later years, Faulkner continued to write although the hard drinking had affected his concentration. While working on A Fable, he kept up with the story by outlining it on the walls of his office at Rowan Oak. 

~ At the age of 64, Faulkner was thrown from a horse. Rushed to Wright's Sanitarium, he died eight hours later of a heart attack. He is buried at St. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford, Mississippi.