William Faulkner

Diagnoses

Vocation

Lifestyle

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Family

American popular novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1955. Biographer's attempts to pin down the essential writer meet with various versions from those who knew him. Faulkner evidently never told the same story to all his friends and family. A small man, mustached and often photographed with his pipe, he became famous for his long, complicated stories set in mythical Yoknapatawpha County. "You can't tell the truth about a man unless you get it complicated up" and "I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it. I created a cosmos of my own" is probably Faulkner defining the quintessential Faulkner. He came from an alcoholic and violent family with his great-grandfather murdered and both his grandfather and father wounded by gunmen. The oldest of four boys, Faulkner had an idyllic childhood, free to wander in the woods on his Shetland pony until age eight when he started school. Not having much respect for formal education he dropped out of school in the 10th grade. He joined the RAF in Canada in 1918, but soon returned home to Oxford, MS as the war ended. He worked in the post office and became a Boy Scout leader but was fired for drinking. Attending a few classes at the university he met older writers who encouraged and influenced him to write. His first novel, "Soldier's Pay," was published in 1925, followed by "Mosquitoes," "Sartoris," The Sanctuary," "As I Lay Dying," and "Light in August." Noted works include "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom." He also wrote short stories for magazines in New York and Screenplays for Howard Hawks and Warner Bros. in Hollywood. He considered his three years in Hollywood as misspent time. Only two of the scripts he worked on made it to the big screen, "To Have and Have Not" (1945) and "The Big Sleep" (1946). Five years later, Faulkner received the Nobel Prize for literature. His fabled drinking apparently never interfered with his writing. As legend has it, he made appointments with himself for four-day benders after sending off a manuscript. "The Reivers" was his last novel, published 6/4/1962. In 1929 he married his childhood sweetheart, Estelle. They remained married despite his years of womanizing and drinking. Faulkner enjoyed horsemanship, hunting, and flying. He also enjoyed teaching aspiring writers at the local university. His heavy drinking and several falls from horses took its toll in 1962. After his last novel was published in June, he was thrown from his horse during an early morning ride near his home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, MS. He swallowed all the pain pills he could find and washed them down with Bourbon. By July he was admitted to a private hospital at Byhalia, 50 miles north of Oxford. At 1:32 AM Faulkner sat up, moaned and died of coronary thrombosis 7/06/1962. Link to Wikipedia biography