Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the
son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the
south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at
fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank. Rejected by the US
military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but
was still in training when the war ended. Returning home he studied
at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly in
1925. His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His
first book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work
began with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I
Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932),
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key
works of his great creative period leading up to Intruder in the
Dust (1948). During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film
scripts, notably The Blue Lamp, co-written with Raymond
Chandler.
William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949
and the Pulitzer Prize for The Reivers just before his death in
July 1962.
The novel in which Faulkner most profoundly and completely says
what he has to say about the South and the human condition
*Walter Allen*
For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style,
variety of characterisation, humour and tragic intensity
[Faulkner's Works] are without equal in our time and country
*Robert Penn Warren*
For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking
out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity
of moral purpose which made which made for the greatness of our
classics
*Ralph Ellison*
The magnitude of Faulkner's characters lies in their blood and bone
and sinew: the exquisite specificity of their human fallibility...
Faulkner seemed incapable of separating intimate character from
universal truth, and this rough refusal - both humble and defiant -
was at the root of his force as a writer... No other American
writer has achieved such staggering heights of form
*Boston Globe*
Heart-pinching
*New York Times*
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