William Faulkner

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi in 1897 and grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life and which became the model for Jefferson, the county seat of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Yoknapatawpha — "water flowing slow through flatland," from the Chickasaw — is one of the most fully realized imaginary geographies in world literature: a specific square mileage with a specific population count (which Faulkner listed on hand-drawn maps), populated by recurring families whose histories extend across multiple novels and decades of American history. He worked as a postmaster at the University of Mississippi, quit or was fired, and published Soldier's Pay in 1926, his first novel. He was 29 when The Sound and the Fury appeared in 1929 and permanently changed American fiction.

The Sound and the Fury tells the story of the Compson family's decline across four sections. The first is narrated by Benjy Compson, a 33-year-old man with severe cognitive disabilities, whose experience of time is non-linear and whose narration shifts between his present (1928) and memories without transition — a technique that disorients the reader into the specific quality of Benjy's consciousness. The second section is narrated by his brother Quentin, a Harvard student who cannot escape the weight of Southern history and his family's ruined honor. The third by Jason, the cold and venal brother. The fourth is a third-person account centered on Dilsey, the family's Black servant. No novel in English had attempted to represent damaged consciousness with this precision. Faulkner said he wrote it four times because he could not get it right; the four sections are also, deliberately, four failed attempts at the same story.

As I Lay Dying (1930) was written in six weeks while Faulkner was working night shifts at a power plant, reportedly written on an upturned wheelbarrow with the wheelbarrow's surface as his desk. It follows the Bundren family's journey across Mississippi to bury the matriarch, Addie Bundren, told in 59 sections from 15 different first-person narrators. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) followed — the latter involving multiple narrators reconstructing the history of Thomas Sutpen, a man who arrived in Mississippi before the Civil War to build a dynasty and whose story is fundamentally about the impossibility of understanding history from within it.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, the announcement of which surprised many people, since his books had gone out of print in the United States. Malcolm Cowley's The Portable Faulkner (1946), which reorganized selections from his work to make Yoknapatawpha legible as a unified project, is credited with the revival. His Nobel address — brief, dense, focused on the question of what literature is for in a time of nuclear anxiety — is often cited as one of the finest Nobel speeches.

His treatment of Black characters and of Southern history has been at the center of critical debate since his own lifetime. His work does not romanticize the Confederacy — Faulkner was clear that the South's history was a history of sin, of the curse of slavery. But his Black characters are often rendered from outside, their interiority less fully available than his white characters', and his political positions on integration were cautious to the point of cowardice. How much this limits the work is a genuine critical question, not one with a tidy answer.