Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Born in 1897 in New Albany, Mississippi, William Faulkner was the
son of a family proud of their prominent role in the history of the
south. He grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, and left high school at
fifteen to work in his grandfather's bank. Rejected by the US
military in 1915, he joined the Canadian flyers with the RAF, but
was still in training when the war ended. Returning home, he
studied at the University of Mississippi and visited Europe briefly
in 1925.
His first poem was published in The New Republic in 1919. His first
book of verse and early novels followed, but his major work began
with the publication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929. As I Lay
Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom,
Absalom! (1936) and The Wild Palms (1939) are the key works of his
great creative period leading up to Intruder in the Dust (1948).
During the 1930s, he worked in Hollywood on film scripts, notably
The Blue Lamp, co-written with Raymond Chandler. William Faulkner
was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer
Prize for The Reivers just before his death in July1962.
One of the most important works of American literature this
century
*Observer*
Faulkner has inexhaustible invention, powerful imagination, and he
writes like an angel
*Arnold Bennett*
For range of effect, philosophical weight, originality of style,
variety of characterisation, humour and tragic intensity
[Faulkner's works] are without equal in our time and country
*Robert Penn Warren*
Its unlike anything else in literature... The experience of reading
it seemed closer to the experience of life than anything provided
by a neatly contrived story line... After the war I read all I
could of William Faulkner, and he continued to present some unique
and, it seemed to me, valid way of looking at life
*Guardian*
Not only was the book a kind of beginning for me, but that it
endured still, it moved me deeply and remains "the damndest book I
ever read"
*Sunday Times*
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