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William Faulkner

© Audrey McCrone

"Every writer starts out as a poet, having failed that, he becomes a short story writer, having failed that, he becomes a novelist."

William Faulkner was and is a complicated writer. His prose is wrought with qualifiers and modifiers, and his sentences are lengthy and sometimes tedious. The writing of Faulkner is poetic prose of the past truth: Old Veritas, or old truths.

Faulkner was born and bred in the Deep South. Oxford, Mississippi was his home and his grandad was a colonel in the Southern states, representing established, old, Southern respectability. As a young man, Faulkner found himself enamored with war, going off to join the Royal Canadian Air Forces.

From 1916 to 1917, he was a pilot, but he never saw action. It seems that after that, he spent much time determining his calling in life, returning to Mississippi for school and joining a frat he soon gave up on; then he landed a job as postmaster, but lost it. He continued reading and writing.

In New Orleans, Faulkner spent six months with Sherwood Anderson. These two future novelists surely must have had some intriguing dialogues on writing, for Faulkner soon centered himself on the art. He spent another six months as a Hollywood scriptwriter, before returning to Mississippi for yet another six months. Anyone else noting three sixes here?

Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in 1950, and his short acceptance speech touched on three basic themes: Old universal truths, the heart in conflict with itself, and the thought of endurance to prevail. Today's readers surely won't agree with his bigotry, but they cannot deny that his works become a veritable 'postage stamp' of the old Southern thinking, and absolutely deserved the prestigious style for capturing this struggle through his prose.

His writing is like free association - jumping from one point to another, the same as inner dialogue would go. His concern for the natural world focuses distinctly on the idea that the past is the present in a writer's mind, and must be written in way that will catalogue history. His approach to writing is genuinely honest, which is why it endures and is taught in classrooms today, whether readers like him personally or not.

One writer who simply could not stand Faulkner was Ernest Hemingway, and professors will reverberate this throughout history forever (and likely, to both of their souls' keen displeasure). Hemingway preferred to provide his reader with pure stimulus, whereas Faulkner's concentration is in inner thought instead.