About William Faulkner
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.
Life → Text Connections
How William Faulkner's real experiences shaped specific elements of As I Lay Dying.
Faulkner grew up in the Mississippi hill country among poor farm families; his great-grandfather was a Civil War colonel, but the family had fallen from its antebellum prominence
The Bundrens' poverty and pride — they are not without dignity, but they have nothing. The Southern class system in miniature.
Faulkner understood the particular combination of pride and deprivation that characterized poor white Mississippi. The Bundrens are not caricatures — they are people he grew up around.
Faulkner wrote the novel in six weeks during night-shift work at a power plant — the most compressed creative period of any major American novel
The novel's formal ambition — 15 narrators, 59 chapters — achieved without sprawl. The compression of the writing is in the compression of the form.
The novel's intensity is partly the intensity of a writer working at full capacity under pressure. The power plant story is also a story about working-class creative life — genius operating in the margins.
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is a fictional version of Lafayette County, Mississippi — the same geography, history, and social structure reimagined
The specificity of the landscape — the roads, the river crossing, the valley, the town — reflects a writer who knew this land in his body
The physical journey in the novel is geographically real — based on actual roads Faulkner knew. The flood and the terrain are the terrain of his childhood.
Historical Era
Rural Mississippi, late 1920s — post-Reconstruction South, Great Depression threshold
How the Era Shapes the Book
The Bundrens' poverty is not metaphorical — it is the poverty of actual Mississippi farm families in the years just before the Depression ground them further. The family cannot afford the doctor who could properly set Cash's leg. The money Anse extracts from his children is the only money any of them have. The asylum at Jackson — to which Darl is sent — was Mississippi's actual institution for the mentally ill, used as Faulkner depicts it. The journey is absurd partly because poverty makes it expensive in ways Anse cannot account for and refuses to acknowledge.