William Faulkner
3 books analyzed
Biography
William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford — the seat of Lafayette County, which he reimagined as Yoknapatawpha County in his fiction. He dropped out of the University of Mississippi, worked odd jobs, briefly served in the Canadian Royal Air Force (WWI ended before he saw combat), and returned to Oxford. He spent much of his career in financial difficulty, writing for Hollywood to pay bills. As I Lay Dying was written in six weeks during night shifts at a power plant, on an upturned wheelbarrow, in 1929. He described the process: 'I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force. I had made up the story and did not know it would be difficult until I began to write it.' He won the Nobel Prize in 1949, largely on the strength of European rediscovery of his work.
William Faulkner at a glance
Works
As I Lay Dying
1930 · 267 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
Fifteen voices. One corpse. A nine-day journey through flood and fire to bury a woman her family may not have loved.
Light in August
1932 · 507 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
A man who might be Black, might be white, and will never be allowed to be neither walks into a town that will destroy him for the ambiguity it cannot tolerate.
The Sound and the Fury
1929 · 326 pages · ★★★★★ Expert
Four voices. Four narrators. One family destroying itself in real time — and Faulkner gives the first chapter to the one who cannot understand what he's telling you.
Diction Across Works
fractured-polyphonic
multi-register — alternates between pastoral warmth (Lena), compressed violence (Joe), elegiac retrospection (Hightower), and collective gossip (the town)
multi-register — ranges from pre-verbal sensation (Benjy) to stream-of-consciousness elegy (Quentin) to sardonic vernacular (Jason) to witness-bearing third person (Dilsey)