William Faulkner

William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897–1962) was born in New Albany, Mississippi, and raised in Oxford, the seat of Lafayette County, which he would transform into the fictional Yoknapatawpha County — “my own little postage stamp of native soil” — across nineteen novels and dozens of short stories. He grew up steeped in the mythology of the defeated South; his great-grandfather, Colonel William Clark Falkner (the family dropped the “u” from the name; William restored it), was a Civil War officer, railroad builder, and author of a popular novel. The shadow of the Old Colonel runs through Faulkner’s work from beginning to end.

Life and Career

Faulkner dropped out of high school, briefly joined the Royal Air Force in Canada (the war ended before he saw action), and returned to Oxford, where he worked odd jobs, wrote poetry, and read voraciously. His first book was a collection of verse, The Marble Faun (1924), published in a tiny edition. His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), was written in New Orleans under the encouragement of Sherwood Anderson. Mosquitoes (1927), a satirical novel of the New Orleans literary scene, followed.

The great period begins with Sartoris (1929), the first Yoknapatawpha novel, and accelerates through four astonishing years: The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932). These four novels, produced in a burst of creative energy unmatched in American letters, established Faulkner’s characteristic methods — stream of consciousness, fractured chronology, multiple narrators, the long Latinate sentence that seems to hold entire histories in its subordinate clauses — and his abiding subjects: the collapse of the Southern planter class, the guilt of slavery, the persistence of racial violence, and the endurance of ordinary people in the face of catastrophic history.

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often cited as his masterpiece: the story of Thomas Sutpen’s doomed attempt to found a dynasty in antebellum Mississippi, told and retold through multiple narrators who can never quite agree on what happened. The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, introduced the rapacious Flem Snopes and is Faulkner’s finest comic achievement.

By the late 1930s Faulkner’s novels were out of print, and he was financially desperate. He spent long, unhappy stretches in Hollywood, writing screenplays (he worked on To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks). Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner (1946) revived critical interest; the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 — awarded for 1950 — sealed his canonical status. His acceptance speech in Stockholm, with its famous closing cadence about the human spirit prevailing, is one of the most quoted literary addresses in English.

The final decade produced Requiem for a Nun (1951), A Fable (1954, which won the Pulitzer Prize), and the completion of the Snopes trilogy with The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). The Reivers (1962), a genial comic novel, appeared weeks before his death from a heart attack on 6 July 1962 at Wright’s Sanitarium in Byhalia, Mississippi. He was sixty-four.

Major Works and Themes

Faulkner’s central subject is the South as a tragic civilization — founded on slavery, destroyed by the Civil War, haunted by guilt, and unable either to forget the past or to confront it honestly. His characters are caught between the myths their families have constructed and the violent realities those myths conceal.

The Sound and the Fury (1929) tells the story of the declining Compson family through four narrators: Benjy, the intellectually disabled youngest son; Quentin, the suicidal Harvard student; Jason, the venal eldest; and an omniscient narrator. The novel’s temporal dislocations and radical use of interior monologue were revolutionary; Faulkner himself called it “the most splendid failure” of his career.

As I Lay Dying (1930), written in six weeks, follows the Bundren family’s grotesque journey to bury their mother Addie in Jefferson. Its fifteen rotating narrators, including the corpse, make it one of the most technically audacious novels in the language.

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is the most formally complex of the novels. Its nested narratives — Quentin Compson and his Harvard roommate Shreve reconstructing the Sutpen saga from fragmentary evidence — anticipate postmodern fiction by decades.

Critical Reception and Legacy

Faulkner’s reputation has fluctuated less than most. After the lean years of the late 1930s and the Hollywood exile, the Nobel Prize restored him permanently to the first rank. He has been a fixed star of the American canon ever since, studied as exhaustively as any novelist in the language. His influence is everywhere: in Toni Morrison (who wrote her master’s thesis on Faulkner and Woolf), in Cormac McCarthy, in Gabriel García Márquez (who acknowledged Faulkner as the decisive influence on his own fiction), and in the magical realism tradition broadly.

Key Works

• The Marble Faun (1924) — poetry
• Soldiers’ Pay (1926)
• Mosquitoes (1927)
• Sartoris (1929)
• The Sound and the Fury (1929)
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Sanctuary (1931)
• Light in August (1932)
• Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
• The Unvanquished (1938)
• The Hamlet (1940)
• Go Down, Moses (1942)
• Intruder in the Dust (1948)
• Requiem for a Nun (1951)
• A Fable (1954)
• The Town (1957)
• The Mansion (1959)
• The Reivers (1962)

Collecting Faulkner

Faulkner is one of the pillars of twentieth-century American book collecting, alongside Hemingway and Fitzgerald. The market is mature, deep, and meticulously documented, with clear hierarchies of desirability among titles, states, and conditions.

The Sound and the Fury (1929, Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith) is the most sought-after title. The first edition was printed in an edition of 1,789 copies, bound in black and white cloth with a dust jacket featuring diagonal black and white stripes. Fine copies in the first-state jacket (without reviews on the rear panel) are genuinely rare and command $40,000–$100,000. Without jacket, fine copies bring $3,000–$8,000.

As I Lay Dying (1930, Cape and Smith) is the second pillar. The first edition was bound in beige cloth with a brown jacket. Fine copies in jacket are scarce and trade between $15,000 and $40,000. Sanctuary (1931, Cape and Smith) benefits from its notoriety — Faulkner called it “the most horrific tale I could imagine” — and fine copies in jacket bring $8,000–$20,000.

Absalom, Absalom! (1936, Random House) is somewhat more available than the earlier titles and is prized for its literary reputation; fine copies in jacket trade between $5,000 and $15,000. The Yoknapatawpha map tipped into the first edition is a notable feature.

Soldiers’ Pay (1926, Boni & Liveright), Faulkner’s first novel, is extremely scarce in jacket — the book sold poorly and most copies were remaindered. Fine copies in jacket, if they surface, can exceed $20,000.

Faulkner signed material is somewhat more available than McCarthy or Pynchon — he was a willing signer, particularly in later life after the Nobel Prize, and inscribed copies to friends, colleagues, and fellow Mississippians surface regularly. The signed limited editions of The Sound and the Fury (1929, limited to 50 copies, though this is actually the 1984 limited edition reprint) and other titles are collected avidly. Typed letters signed are available in the $2,000–$6,000 range; holograph letters and inscribed first editions of major titles command substantially more. Association copies — particularly those to his editor Saxe Commins, to Malcolm Cowley, or to fellow writers — are blue-chip items.