Faulkner short biography. William Faulkner books, biography. Brief biography of William Faulkner by year

Biography

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi (USA) on September 25, 1897. In the family of a university employee. Family played an important role for William; he was the eldest son, and later he had to become the head of the family. Faulkner's talent for literary craftsmanship manifested itself early; he began writing poetry as a child. A more serious manifestation of creativity will begin after studying in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

After 1918, he studied at the University of Mississippi, worked as a laborer, and published a volume of poetry. The most noticeable mark on his work was left by the acquaintance of seventeen-year-old Faulkner with Philip Stone.

In 1925, he left for New Orleans, where he met Sherwood Anderson, who, after viewing William’s works, advised him to take up prose seriously. In 1925 – 1927 his novels “Soldiers’ Pay” and “Mosquitoes” were published. In the summer of 1927, Faulkner began writing his famous novel in a series of books about the fictional country “Yoknapatawpha County.” In 1928, William changed his last name from the original Falkner. And the next year, 1929, William Faulkner marries Estelle Oldham and becomes a stepfather to her two children from her first marriage. The family lives on money raised from Faulkner's literary activities. Since 1930, the author has been sending his stories to various national publications and buying a house in Oxford.

But closer to 1932, his financial situation was deteriorating, and William decided to sell the copyright to the novel “Light in August.” But the publication did not accept the offer.

Faulkner then accepted the position of MGM Studios and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood from 1932 to the 1940s. From February to June 1957, William served as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia. While riding a horse in 1959, he was seriously injured.

William Faulkner(1897-1962), a modernist writer of the same generation as E. Hemingway, who worked in the same genres (short and long-form prose); like Hemingway, winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes (1949), who passed away almost simultaneously with Hemingway, in other respects he was almost his complete opposite. If Hemingway’s work is based on the facts of his biography and is inseparable from his time (20-50s of the XX century), then W. Faulkner’s prose is outside the specific events of his life and outside time, even if the author accurately indicates the date of a particular event.

W. Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, in a house full of close and distant relatives and family legends about glorious ancestors, among whom the writer's great-great-grandfather William Clark Faulkner stood out. The glorious great-great-grandfather was a lawyer, a colonel in the Confederate Army in the Civil War, the author of the popular romantic novel The White Rose of Memphis (1881), and had a substantial income and a keen sense of honor. The Faulkner family, a prominent and wealthy railroad owner, experienced financial decline by the early 20th century. W. Faulkner's father had to earn money: he kept stables, a store, and then became treasurer of the University of Mississippi.

Faulkner graduated from school in 1915; in 1918 he volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force and served in Toronto for several months. In 1919, as a young veteran, he was accepted into the University of Mississippi, where he studied French language and literature, but left this pursuit after a year and a half. He worked as a bookstore salesman in New York, a carpenter, a painter, and then as a university postmaster in his native Oxford. In 1924 he left for New Orleans, where he met S. Anderson, which determined his destiny as a writer.

Since his school years, having tried without much success to write poetry and short prose, having several magazine publications and the poetry collection “The Marble Faun,” Faulkner found a patron, inspirer and teacher in S. Anderson. In 1925, he traveled around Europe, visited Italy, Switzerland, France and England and returned to New Orleans, and soon went to his Oxford to live there until the end of his days. Faulkner's tribute to the cosmopolitan spirit of his generation was thus minimal; what fueled Hemingway, Henry Miller and others all their lives - travel, impressions, getting to know the world - Faulkner fit into one year. Only in the early 1950s, after becoming a Nobel laureate, did he leave Oxford for a time for short lecture trips to Europe and once to Japan.

Faulkner's tribute to the theme of the "lost" prose was also minimal and was limited to a collection of short stories and two novels ("Soldier's Award", 1926; "Mosquitoes", 1927). Already at the end of the 20s, he found his original topic - the history and modernity of the American South - and published two works ("The Sound and the Fury", 1929; "Sartoris", 1929), which were then included in the so-called "Yoknapatawaw Saga".

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha consists of over seventy short stories, mostly combined into cycles ("Come Down, Moses!", "The Undefeated", etc.), and seventeen novels: "Light in August" (1932), "Absalom, Absalom! " (1936), "Requiem for a Nun" (1951), the trilogy "The Village" (1940), "The Town" (1957), "The Mansion" (1960) and others, the action of which takes place in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County in the US South, and the characters move from work to work.

Yoknapatawpha, inhabited by aristocrats (Sartoris, Compsons, Sutpenes, De Spains), the descendants of their black slaves and the “white naked”, is an exact model of the southern province, behind which a certain global mythological model of life in general is visible. The scale and significance of what is happening is emphasized by the author’s explicit or hidden appeal to the Bible, to ancient mythological ideas and rituals of Native Americans.

The very structure of the mythopoetic thinking of America's passing is captured in the original principle of organization of the artistic world of the "Yoknapatawaw saga", where the past is intertwined with the present, because time here does not move in a progressive sequence, but cyclically, and the destinies of people are built into its eternal rotation.

The writer’s accurate reproduction of the mythological concept of time and human life, the very style of myth-making thinking, is the result of his intuitive approach to the fundamental principles of existence, which, in turn, is associated with Faulkner’s rootedness in the life of the patriarchal agrarian American South, which carefully preserves its traditions. This rootedness largely explains the fact that the work of W. Faulkner, closed in space, but infinitely expanded in time, based not on individual specific historical, but on eternal universal human experience, broke out of the rather narrow aesthetic framework of the literature of the post-war generation.

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William Cuthbert Faulkner - American writer, novelist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1949) - born September 25, 1897 in New Albany (Mississippi) in the family of Murray University administrator Charles Faulkner and Maude (Butler) Faulkner.

His great-grandfather, William Faulkner (1826-1889), served in the Southern Army during the Southern War and was the author of the then-famous novel The White Rose of Memphis. When Faulkner was still a child, the family moved to the city of Oxford, in the north of the state, where the writer lived all his life. William was self-educated: he graduated from junior high school, then educated himself and periodically took courses at the University of Mississippi.

In 1918 Estelle Oldham, with whom Faulkner had been in love since childhood, married someone else. William decided to volunteer for the front, but he was not accepted, also because of his height (166 cm). He then volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force and attended the British Army Flying School in Toronto, but before he could complete the course, the First World War was over.

Faulkner returned to Oxford and again began attending classes at the University of Mississippi, however, he soon dropped out. A year before, in 1919, his literary debut took place: his poem “The Afternoon of a Faun” (“Après-midi d’un faune”) was published in The New Republic magazine. Then in 1924 Faulkner's first book was published - a collection of poems "The Marble Faun".

In 1925 Faulkner met writer Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans. He recommended that Faulkner pay more attention to prose rather than poetry, and gave advice to write about what Faulkner knew best - about the American South, about one tiny piece of this land “the size of a postage stamp.”

The first novel in the saga was Sartoris, which depicts the decline of the Mississippi slave-owning aristocracy following the social upheaval of the Civil War. (in 1929 an abridged version of the novel was published; it was published in full only in 1973 entitled "Flags in the Dust").

Faulkner received his first great recognition after the publication of his novel The Sound and the Fury. 1929 ). That same year he married Estelle Oldham, following her divorce from her first husband. They had two daughters: Alabama, who died in 1931, and Jill. However, Faulkner's works were mostly successful with critics rather than with readers, being considered unusual and complex.

To support his family, Faulkner began writing scripts for Hollywood, signing in April 1932 contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The contract provided for a fee of $500 per week. For this money, Faulkner was required to "write original plots and dialogue, make adaptations, develop scripts, etc., and perform all other functions usually performed by writers." The writer considered this work as income in order to be able to engage in serious literature. Despite some obstinacy and frequent absences from home, he treated his work conscientiously. In Hollywood, it was considered a very good result if a screenwriter wrote five pages a day, and Faulkner sometimes wrote 35 pages.

The writer was associated with Hollywood for fifteen years - from 1932 to 1946, directing several films with director Howard Hawks. During these same years he created the novels: “Light in August” ( 1932 ), "Absalom, Absalom!" ( 1936 ), "Undefeated" ( 1938 ), "Wild Palms" ( 1939 ), "Village" ( 1940 ) and others, as well as the novel in short stories “Come Down, Moses” ( 1942 ), which included his most famous story “The Bear”.

Only the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949(for “a significant and artistically unique contribution to the development of the modern American novel”) brought Faulkner, whose work had long been beloved in Europe, recognition at home. In 2009 The board of the American Southern literary magazine Oxford American called “Absalom, Absalom!” the best southern novel of all time.

Novels:
Soldier's Award / Soldiers" Pay ( 1926 )
Mosquitoes ( 1927 )
Sartoris / Sartoris (Flags in the Dust) ( 1929 )
The Sound and the Fury ( 1929 )
When I was dying / As I Lay Dying ( 1930 )
Sanctuary ( 1931 )
Light in August / Light in August ( 1932 )
Pylon / Pylon ( 1935 )
Absalom, Absalom! / Absalom, Absalom! ( 1936 )
The Unvanquished ( 1938 )
Wild Palms / The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) ( 1939 )
Village / The Hamlet ( 1940 )
Go Down, Moses ( 1942 )
Intruder in the Dust ( 1948 )
Requiem for a Nun ( 1951 )
Parable / A Fable ( 1954 , Pulitzer Prize)
The Town ( 1957 )
Mansion / The Mansion ( 1959 )
The Reivers ( 1962 , Pulitzer Prize)

Collections of stories:
Thirteen / These Thirteen ( 1931 )
Doctor Martino and Other Stories / Doctor Martino and Other Stories ( 1934 )
Favorites / The Portable Faulkner ( 1946 )
Royal Gambit / Knight's Gambit ( 1949 )
Collected Stories of William Faulkner ( 1950 )
Big Woods: The Hunting Stories ( 1955 )
New Orleans Sketches ( 1958 )

American writer, novelist

short biography

(eng. William Cuthbert Faulkner, 1897 - 1962) - American writer, prose writer, Nobel Prize laureate in literature (1949).

Born on September 25, 1897 in New Albany (Mississippi) in the family of Murray University business manager Charles Faulkner and Maude (Butler) Faulkner. His great-grandfather, William Faulkner (1826-1889), served in the Southern Army during the Southern War and was the author of the then-famous novel The White Rose of Memphis. When Faulkner was still a child, the family moved to the city of Oxford, in the north of the state, where the writer lived all his life. William was self-educated: he graduated from junior high school, then educated himself and periodically took courses at the University of Mississippi.

In 1918, Estelle Oldham, with whom Faulkner had been in love since childhood, married someone else. William decided to volunteer for the front, but he was not accepted, also because of his height (166 cm). He then volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force and attended the British Army Flying School in Toronto, but before he could complete the course, the First World War ended.

Faulkner returned to Oxford and again began attending classes at the University of Mississippi, however, he soon dropped out. A year earlier, in 1919, he made his literary debut: his poem “The Afternoon of a Faun” (“Après-midi d’un faune”) was published in The New Republic magazine. Then in 1924 his first book was published - a collection of poems “The Marble Faun”.

In 1925, Faulkner met writer Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans. He recommended that Faulkner pay more attention to prose rather than poetry, and gave advice to write about what Faulkner knew best - about the American South, about one tiny piece of this land “the size of a postage stamp.”

Soon a new county appeared in Mississippi - Yoknapatawpha, fictional by Faulkner, where most of his works would take place. Together they make up the Yoknopatawaw saga - the history of the American South from the arrival of the first white settlers on Indian lands to the mid-twentieth century. A special place in it is occupied by the Civil War of 1861-1865, in which the southerners were defeated. The heroes of the saga were representatives of several families - the Sartoris, de Spain, Compson, Snopes, as well as other residents of Yoknapatawpha. Moving from work to work, they become old acquaintances, real people, about whose lives you learn something new every time. The first novel in the saga was Sartoris, which depicts the decline of Mississippi's slave-owning aristocracy following the social upheaval of the Civil War (an abridged version of the novel was published in 1929; it was not published in full until 1973 under the title Flags in the Dust).

Faulkner received his first great recognition after the publication of the novel “The Sound and the Fury” (1929). That same year he married Estelle Oldham, following her divorce from her first husband. They had two daughters: Alabama, who died in 1931, and Jill. However, Faulkner's works were mostly successful with critics rather than with readers, being considered unusual and complex.

To support his family, Faulkner began writing scripts for Hollywood, signing a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in April 1932. The contract provided for a fee of $500 per week. For this money, Faulkner was required to "write original plots and dialogue, make adaptations, develop scripts, etc., and perform all other functions usually performed by writers." The writer considered this work as income in order to be able to engage in serious literature (“I make up for the salary for literary work in the cinema”). Once, called to the studio and crossing the border of the state of California, he said to his companion: “Here we should put a pillar with the inscription: “Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” or whatever it is from Dante. Nevertheless, despite some obstinacy and frequent absences from home, he treated his work conscientiously. For example, Faulkner amazed screenwriter Joel Sayre with his efficiency. In Hollywood, it was considered a very good result if a screenwriter wrote five pages a day, and Faulkner sometimes wrote 35 pages.

The writer was associated with Hollywood for fifteen years - from 1932 to 1946, directing several films with director Howard Hawks. During these same years, he created the novels: “Light in August” (1932), “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936), “The Undefeated” (1938), “Wild Palms” (1939), “The Village” (1940) and others, as well as the novel in short stories “Come Down, Moses” (1942), which included his most famous story “The Bear” "

Only the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 (for “a significant and artistically unique contribution to the development of the modern American novel”) brought Faulkner, whose work had long been beloved in Europe, recognition at home. In 2009, the panel of the Southern literary journal Oxford American called "Absalom, Absalom!" the best southern novel of all time.

Novels

Soldier's Award / Soldiers" Pay (1926)
Mosquitoes / Mosquitoes (1927)
Sartoris / Sartoris (Flags in the Dust) (1929)
The Sound and the Fury / The Sound and the Fury (1929)
When I was dying / As I Lay Dying (1930)
Sanctuary / Sanctuary (1931)
Light in August / Light in August (1932)
Pylon / Pylon (1935)
Absalom, Absalom! / Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Undefeated / The Unvanquished (1938)
Wild palms / The Wild Palms (If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem) (1939)
Village / The Hamlet (1940)
Come down, Moses / Go Down, Moses (1942)
Desfilator of Ashes / Intruder in the Dust (1948)
Requiem for a Nun / Requiem for a Nun (1951)
Parable / A Fable(1954, Pulitzer Prize)
City / The Town (1957)
Mansion / The Mansion (1959)
Kidnappers / The Reivers(1962, Pulitzer Prize)

Collections of stories

These Thirteen (1931)
Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934)
Favorites / The Portable Faulkner (1946)
Royal Gambit / Knight's Gambit (1949)
Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950)
Big Woods: The Hunting Stories (1955)
New Orleans Sketches (1958)

Translations into Russian

Collected works in 6 volumes. M., Fiction, 1985 - 1987
Seven stories. M., ed. foreign lit., 1958
Arsonist. Stories. M., Pravda, 1959
Full turn around. Stories. M., Pravda, 1963.
Village. M., Fiction, 1964
City. M., Fiction, 1965
Mansion. M., Fiction, 1965
Sartoris. Bear. Defiler of ashes. M., Progress, 1973, 1974
Light in August. Mansion. M., Fiction, 1975
Collection of stories. M., Nauka, 1977

William Cuthbert Faulkner - famous American writer, whose works have long become classics of world art. In 1949 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1955 and 1963 he won the Pulitzer Prize.
The future writer was born in the Mississippi city of New Albany. As a child, he and his family moved to Oxford, where he lived for the rest of his life, creating a lot of magnificent works. Faulkner's first poem (The Afternoon of a Faun) was published in 1919 in The New Republic. For a long time he studied poetry, but after meeting the writer Sherwood Anderson in 1925, on his advice he began to pay more attention to prose. He wrote about what he knew best—the American South. To do this, he came up with his own district in Mississippi, which was called Yoknapatawpha and subsequently placed here most of the stories and adventures of the characters in his books.
William Faulkner's books are like one very long novel, a literary series, the action of which stretches over several centuries. The history of the American South from W. Faulkner begins with the arrival of white settlers in these populated areas. The Yoknapatawaw Saga ends in the mid-20th century. Not only are the lands of the fictional Mississippi county similar, but also several families that move from one book to another. The Sartoris, de Spains, Compsons, Snopes and many others are familiar and beloved to those who are familiar with the work of this extraordinary writer.
On June 17, 1962, William fell from his horse and was hospitalized. The writer, prose writer, literary modernist, who is still considered unsurpassed, died in the American city of Bayhelia on July 6, 1962. Faulkner's last work was The Kidnappers.

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List of books:

red leaves

Absalom, Absalom!

village

Wild palms

To the stars

When I was dying

Undefeated

Fire and hearth

Defiler of Ashes

Full turn around

Requiem for a Nun

Sartoris

Light in August

Sanctuary

Soldier's award

Knight's move

The Sound and the Fury

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