William Faulkner, born September 25, 1897

Today is the 111th anniversary of William Faulkner's birth.

Portrait of William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner / Robert Vickrey,, 1964 / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine   

William Faulkner is one of eleven Americans to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In Gustaf Hellstrom’s presentation address to the Swedish Academy in 1950, he said, “Faulkner . . . is not fascinated by men as a community but by man in the community, the individual as a final unity in himself, curiously unmoved by external conditions. . . . But Faulkner has one belief, or rather one hope: that every man sooner or later receives the punishment he deserves and that self-sacrifice not only brings with it personal happiness but also adds to the sum total of the good deeds of mankind.”

In his acceptance speech, Faulkner summarized what he believed to be the condition of man:

"I decline to accept the end of man.  It is enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.  I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.  The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.  It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.  The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail."

Faulkner’s novels include The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Intruder in the Dust, novels that tell the story of the American South many decades after the Civil War.  Faulkner’s South struggles to reinvent itself as an economically and culturally viable region, and the families of his imaginary town seat of Jefferson, within the equally imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, are families whose respective sagas reflect their collective fight against poverty, change, and loss of legacy.

William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi on September 25, 1897, and died on July 6, 1962, in Oxford, Mississippi.

William Faulkner's home
Faulkner's former home "Rowan Oak" in Oxford, Mississippi (photo by Warren Perry).

 

William and Estelle Faulkner gravestones
Faulkner's grave (left) in St. Peter's Cemetery, Oxford, Mississippi. He is buried next to his wife, Estelle (photo by Warren Perry).