William Faulkner bio

William Faulkner was a man full of new ideas. His fourth novel, The Sound and the Fury, was highly acclaimed and mainly recognized for it’s unconventional use of punctuation and sentence structure. This was all completely experimental in Faulkner’s time, making him a literary genius. 

Many people claim that William Faulkner’s work is difficult to read and comprehend, but only because, in The Sound and the Fury for example, he uses a variety of different time periods and a “stream-of-consciousness technique” that can be seen as confusing for the average reader.

Faulkner was born into an extremely accomplished family, one of the well-known relatives being  his grandfather,  William Clark Falkner, who was a highly proficient best-selling author as well. It’s safe to say that natural literary talent ran through Faulkner’s blood because he exhibited artistic gifts at a very young age. Although it was almost assumed that he would take up a writing job immediately, Faulkner instead “accepted an invitation to become a cadet in training in the Royal Air Force in Canada”.

The life as a pilot wasn’t one for him, however, that doesn’t mean he didn’t accomplish heroic things in his lifetime.He took up his second love, writing, and he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Although he was awarded this prestigious award for his work, he didn’t take full credit for the prize; he mostly credited his work itself, saying that his piece “...was not made to me as a man, but to my work”. Originally, the listeners of this acceptance speech didn’t understand this phrase the first time it left his mouth, due to his strong Southern accent and the placement of the microphone. It wasn’t until the next day when his entire speech was printed in the newspapers that everyone was able to fully understand and commend Faulkner.

These events made William Faulkner a very public and well-recognized figure, which is ironic because he was an extremely private person. Nevertheless, it’s said that figures from his private past are prominent in his literature, like his famous grandfather, who inspired a character in his later novels. William Faulkner was a very talented writer, and his works are still topical today and taught in American Literature classes all across the country.