66 Facts About William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life.

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi when he was a child.

William Faulkner moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay.

William Faulkner went back to Oxford and wrote Sartoris, his first work set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

William Faulkner worked as a screenwriter, contributing to Howard Hawks's To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep; the former film, adapted from a novel by Ernest Hemingway, is the only film with contributions by two Nobel laureates.

William Faulkner died from a heart attack on July 6,1962, following a fall from his horse the prior month.

William Faulkner Cuthbert Falkner was born on September 25,1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons of Murry Cuthbert Falkner and Maud Butler.

William Faulkner's family was upper middle-class, but "not quite of the old feudal cotton aristocracy".

Except for short periods elsewhere, William Faulkner lived in Oxford for the rest of his life.

William Faulkner spent his boyhood listening to stories told to him by his elders including those about the Civil War, slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and the William Faulkner family.

Young William Faulkner was greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he lived.

William Faulkner was particularly influenced by stories of his great-grandfather William Clark Falkner, who had become a near legendary figure in North Mississippi.

William Faulkner incorporated many aspects of his great-grandfather's biography into his later works.

William Faulkner initially excelled in school and skipped the second grade.

However, beginning somewhere in the fourth and fifth grades of his schooling, William Faulkner became a much quieter and more withdrawn child.

William Faulkner occasionally skipped school and became indifferent about schoolwork.

When he was 17, William Faulkner met Phil Stone, who became an important early influence on his writing.

Stone mentored the young William Faulkner, introducing him to the works of writers like James Joyce, who influenced William Faulkner's own writing.

In spring 1918, William Faulkner traveled to live with Stone at Yale, his first trip to the North.

Accounts of William Faulkner being rejected from the United States Army Air Service due to his short stature, despite wide publication, are false.

William Faulkner returned to Oxford in December 1918, where he told acquaintances false war-stories and even faked a war wound.

William Faulkner did not write his first novel until 1925.

William Faulkner once stated that he modeled his early writing on the Romantic era in late 18th- and early 19th-century England.

William Faulkner attended the University of Mississippi, enrolling in 1919, studying for three semesters before dropping out in November 1920.

William Faulkner joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, and pursued his dream to become a writer.

William Faulkner skipped classes often and received a "D" grade in English.

William Faulkner spent the first half of 1925 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where many bohemian artists and writers lived, specifically in the French Quarter where William Faulkner lived beginning in March.

William Faulkner was devastated by this rejection but he eventually allowed his literary agent, Ben Wasson, to edit the text, and the novel was published in 1929 as Sartoris.

William Faulkner started by writing three short stories about a group of children with the last name Compson, but soon began to feel that the characters he had created might be better suited for a full-length novel.

In 1929, William Faulkner married Estelle Oldham, with Andrew Kuhn serving as best man at the wedding.

Estelle brought with her two children from her previous marriage to Cornell Franklin and William Faulkner hoped to support his new family as a writer.

William Faulkner began writing As I Lay Dying in 1929 while working night shifts at the University of Mississippi Power House.

William Faulkner was not an avid movie goer and had reservations about working in the movie industry.

William Faulkner then wrote a screen adaptation of Sartoris that was never produced.

From 1932 to 1954, William Faulkner worked on around 50 films.

In early 1944, William Faulkner wrote a screenplay adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's novel To Have and Have Not.

William Faulkner continued to find reliable work as a screenwriter from the 1930s to the 1950s.

William Faulkner had an extramarital affair with Hawks' secretary and script girl, Meta Carpenter.

Amid this creative slowdown, in 1943, William Faulkner began work on a new novel that merged World War I's Unknown Soldier with the Passion of Christ.

The jury had selected Milton Lott's The Last Hunt for the prize, but Pulitzer Prize Administrator Professor John Hohenberg convinced the Pulitzer board that William Faulkner was long overdue for the award, despite A Fable being a lesser work of his, and the board overrode the jury's selection, much to the disgust of its members.

William Faulkner was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel".

When William Faulkner visited Stockholm in December 1950 to receive the Nobel Prize, he met Else Jonsson, who was the widow of journalist Thorsten Jonsson.

At the banquet where they met in 1950, publisher Tor Bonnier introduced Else as the widow of the man responsible for William Faulkner winning the Nobel prize.

However, William Faulkner detested the fame and glory that resulted from his recognition.

William Faulkner's aversion was so great that his 17-year-old daughter learned of the Nobel Prize only when she was called to the principal's office during the school day.

In 1951, William Faulkner received the Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur medal from the government of France.

William Faulkner served as the first Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia at Charlottesville from February to June 1957 and again in 1958.

In 1961, William Faulkner began writing his nineteenth and final novel, The Reivers.

On June 17,1962, William Faulkner suffered a serious injury in a fall from his horse, which led to thrombosis.

William Faulkner suffered a fatal heart attack on July 6,1962, at the age of 64, at Wright's Sanatorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.

William Faulkner is buried with his family in St Peter's Cemetery in Oxford.

William Faulkner wrote two volumes of poetry which were published in small printings, The Marble Faun, and A Green Bough, and a collection of mystery stories, Knight's Gambit.

William Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence.

In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner made frequent use of stream of consciousness in his writing, and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic or grotesque stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor white, agrarian, or working-class Southerners, and Southern aristocrats.

William Faulkner's work has been examined by many critics from a wide variety of critical perspectives, including his position on slavery in the South and his view that desegregation was not an idea to be forced, arguing desegregation should "go slow" so as not to upend the southern way of life.

Since then, critics have looked at William Faulkner's work using other approaches, such as feminist and psychoanalytic methods.

William Faulkner's works have been placed within the literary traditions of modernism and the Southern Renaissance.

French philosopher Albert Camus wrote that William Faulkner successfully imported classical tragedy into the 20th century through his "interminably unwinding spiral of words and sentences that conducts the speaker to the abyss of sufferings buried in the past".

In 1943, while working at Warner Brothers, William Faulkner wrote a letter of encouragement a young Mississippi writer, Eudora Welty.

William Faulkner had great influence on Mario Vargas Llosa, particularly on his early novels The Time of the Hero, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral.

The works of William Faulkner are a clear influence on the French novelist Claude Simon, and the Portuguese novelist Antonio Lobo Antunes.

William Faulkner's scribblings are preserved on the wall, including the day-by-day outline covering a week he wrote on the walls of his small study to help him keep track of the plot twists in his novel A Fable.

William Faulkner remains especially popular in France, where a 2009 poll found him the second most popular writer.

Contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre stated that "for young people in France, William Faulkner is a god", and Albert Camus made a stage adaptation of William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun.

William Faulkner won the US National Book Award twice, for Collected Stories in 1951 and A Fable in 1955.

William Faulkner had once served as Postmaster at the University of Mississippi, and in his letter of resignation in 1923 wrote:.