William Faulkner — GoBasics Literature

Life & Background

Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897 into a family shaped by Confederate legend and postwar decline; his great-grandfather was a colonel, novelist, and railroad builder whose story he reworked repeatedly. He was a poor student, never finished high school, trained briefly with the Royal Air Force in Canada without seeing combat, and returned to Oxford, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Sherwood Anderson encouraged him to write about his own region, and from Sartoris onwards he set his fiction in the invented Yoknapatawpha County. The difficult novels sold badly, and he supported himself with Hollywood screenwriting, including work on The Big Sleep. The Nobel Prize in 1949 and Malcolm Cowley's Portable Faulkner restored his reputation. He died in 1962.

The Sound and the Fury

1929

Plot summary

The decline of the Compson family, told in four sections. The first is narrated by Benjy, an intellectually disabled man of thirty-three, whose account moves without warning between 1898 and 1928 because he does not distinguish past from present. The second belongs to his brother Quentin, a Harvard student on the last day of his life in 1910, obsessed with his sister Caddy's sexuality and the family's lost honour. The third is Jason's, bitter and grasping, in 1928. The fourth is told in the third person, centred on Dilsey, the Black servant who holds the household together. Caddy, the sister at the centre of all three brothers' fixations, never narrates a section of her own.

Literary analysis

The novel's method is radical restriction: each section withholds the information needed to read it, so meaning accumulates retrospectively and the reader assembles the story the family cannot tell. Benjy's section makes time non-sequential because consciousness is; Quentin's dissolves syntax and punctuation as his mind does. Faulkner's long, subordinated sentences hold past and present in a single grammatical structure, which is the formal version of his repeated claim that the past is never dead. The absent Caddy — described by every brother, given no voice — has been the focus of feminist criticism, and the presentation of Dilsey the focus of debate about Faulkner's handling of race.

Why Faulkner Matters

Faulkner brought high modernist technique to American regional material and produced the most formally ambitious body of fiction in American literature. Yoknapatawpha, mapped across a dozen novels with recurring families, became the model for the invented literary region, influencing García Márquez's Macondo directly and, through him, the Latin American boom. His subjects — slavery's legacy, land, memory, and the Southern family — remain central to American literary study, and his Nobel address on the writer's duty is a widely quoted statement of literary purpose.

Key Facts

Yoknapatawpha County

His invented Mississippi county, of which he called himself sole owner and proprietor, is the setting of most of his fiction.

Nobel Prize 1949

Awarded in 1950 for 1949; his acceptance speech argued that the writer's duty is to the human heart in conflict with itself.

Hollywood screenwriter

He wrote for Howard Hawks, contributing to To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep.

Influenced García Márquez

Macondo is directly indebted to Yoknapatawpha; Faulkner's reception in Latin America shaped the boom generation.

All Major Works

The Sound and the Fury1929
As I Lay Dying1930
Sanctuary1931
Light in August1932
Absalom, Absalom!1936
Go Down, Moses1942
A Fable1954